Carbon Footprint Software

For companies or other entities interested in tracking their environmental cost of doing business in the form of CO2 emissions (i.e. their carbon footprint), a number of software tools and consulting services are available. The company Planet Metrics has some interesting offerings in this area. They claim to differ from the pack in their larger-scale assessment of carbon footprint, tracking a company’s activities back through its supply chain and considering the entire life cycle of products and services. Here is a clip about them from ecoworld:

What differentiates Planet Metrics, according to CEO Andy Leventhal, is that the competition focuses on helping companies do carbon accounting and data collection, but they don’t have the ability to model carbon data, performing what-ifs, nor do they have the rich database of stored life cycle analysis (LCA) assessments. Also unique with Planet Metrics is how they have integrated over 4,500 LCA’s with an Economic Input/Output (EIO) model they licensed from Carnegie Mellon. With this continuously updated and expanded LCA/EIO engine, Planet Metrics has added a carbon assessment feature, allowing companies using their software to rapidly estimate the carbon impact of their operations.

Check out their web site for more information. See also this earlier greenOR post about a McKinsey report on carbon footprints and this one about green supply chains that mentions an extension to ILOG software for measuring supply chain carbon footprints.

Update: Carbon software company claims broad patent by Martin LaMonica on CNET Green Tech, 6/5/09