# How does a merchant exporter without a factory calculate a product carbon footprint?

Canonical: https://senseible.earth/answers/merchant-exporter-carbon-footprint-without-factory

A merchant exporter starts from the manufacturer's cradle-to-gate footprint per unit, then adds what it adds: freight to its warehouse, repacking and labelling, warehouse energy and export packaging. If the maker gives no figure, use a material-weight or spend-based estimate, labelled as such. You can make the claim without owning a factory.

## Whose emissions are in a traded product

Almost all of a traded product's footprint sits with the manufacturer and its suppliers: materials, energy and processing. The exporter's part is smaller but real: transport legs, packaging and storage. A product footprint under ISO 14067 or the GHG Protocol Product Standard covers the product's life cycle, whoever reports it, so the maker's figure is your starting point.

## Getting the manufacturer's figure

- Ask for kg CO2e per unit, cradle to gate, with the boundary, year, standard used and the share of primary data.
- Check it is for the exact item, size and material you buy, not a factory average.
- If your buyer uses the PACT data exchange format, ask the maker for its fields, or fill them yourself from what the maker sends.
- Where the maker has only bills, help it allocate its fuel and electricity to your order by units or machine hours.

## When the maker cannot give data

1. Material weights: weigh each material in one unit and apply a secondary factor per kg, with its source.
2. Spend-based: only if there is no weight, using the maker's price, not your selling price, and labelled as spend-based with wider uncertainty.
3. Mark the result as secondary data, and ask the maker again next year.

## What you add, and what you may leave out

- Inbound freight: tonnes x km x a factor for the mode and truck class.
- Repacking and export packaging: kg of each material x its factor.
- Warehouse electricity: allocate by units or volume handled, x 0.710 kg CO2 per kWh.
- Office overhead: the GHG Protocol Product Standard does not require non-attributable processes such as administration. Say whether you included it.

## Illustrative: 1,000 cotton shirts

- Manufacturer's cradle-to-gate figure: 5.0 kg CO2e per shirt (illustrative)
- Inbound truck: 2 t x 400 km = 800 tonne-km x an illustrative 0.1 kg CO2e = 80 kg; 0.08 kg per shirt
- Polybags and cartons: 0.05 kg CO2e per shirt (illustrative)
- Warehouse share: 60 kWh x 0.710 = 42.6 kg; 0.043 kg per shirt
- Total to the exporter's gate: 5.0 + 0.08 + 0.05 + 0.043 = 5.17 kg CO2e per shirt

All factors except the grid factor are illustrative. The maker's figure decides most of the result, so its quality matters most.

## What Senseible does here

Senseible keeps manufacturers' invoices, and any footprint they send, in the Scope 3 supplier evidence trail, and provides spend-based estimates labelled with wider uncertainty where no supplier data exist. Its logistics calculator estimates freight from tonnes, distance and mode.

- [Goods bought from a trader](https://senseible.earth/answers/goods-bought-from-trader-scope-3)
- [Can I use my supplier's product footprint?](https://senseible.earth/answers/can-i-use-my-suppliers-product-footprint)
- [Buyer asked for a product footprint](https://senseible.earth/answers/buyer-asked-for-product-carbon-footprint-what-to-send)
- [Logistics emissions calculator](https://senseible.earth/calculators/logistics-emissions)

Sources: [GHG Protocol Product Life Cycle Accounting and Reporting Standard (2011)](https://ghgprotocol.org/standards), [ISO 14067:2018, Carbon footprint of products](https://www.iso.org), [WBCSD PACT Methodology, version 3](https://www.wbcsd.org)

Last reviewed 2026-10-18.