ISSUES

British Standards Institute leads the development of a Publicly Available Specification (PAS) for a method for measuring the embodied greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from products and services

Latest on PAS 2050

The idea of measuring is to fully understand exactly what goes on within your organisation's boundary - the objective being to discover which materials, processes, inputs and functions have the highest carbon emissions.

You will need to draw up an inventory of the emissions within the boundary you have set. You will need to account for all the sources of emissions that occur from operations owned or controlled by your organisation - these are direct emissions. If you make any exceptions you need to disclose these and justify why. In addition to burning fuel for energy you may also be producing other Green House Gases as part of industrial processes such as CFCs, NOx. Although these are not included in the Kyoto Protocol you should consider how to measure and include these.

Units of energy Energy is measured in joules or calories. Dieticians and nutritionists use calories. The calorie was originally defined as the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree centigrade. A single beat of the human heart uses 0.5 joules of energy. The amount of energy in one litre of petrol is 35,000,000 joules.

Task 1 Identify sources of direct emissions
Draw up an inventory of the fuels used, together with any processes, that cause direct Green House Gas emissions.
List what these are used for and find out which GHGs they emit.

Task 2 Measure sources of emissions
Check how each category of fuel, and process, is measured. Find out the quantities used.

Example

Electricity generation creates emissions at the power plant and is considered next with your indirect emissions

Next you need to measure your indirect emissions