Create CO₂ balances yourself – the software for CCF & PCF
With ecozoom, you capture the CO₂ data of your company and your products yourself.
Simple to use, reliable in its results and practical for everyday work.
- Field Experiences
- Insights from Our Work
- Accounting & Data
PCF – Does It Drive Revenue or Just Create Effort?
2/27/26Reading time:
When the market asks for product data, doing nothing is rarely the cheaper option.
The key question
– and not only for PCFs.
“Do we really need this?”
With PCFs, the counter-question is often more helpful:
What does it cost if you can’t provide one?
With Product Carbon Footprints, the decision is rarely about “nice that we did it,” but about whether you can deliver product values when the market demands them – in inquiries, tenders, and supply chains.
Three observations from practice – and what they mean
1) Requirements rarely arrive as “please provide a PCF”
They arrive as: “Product data / footprint / evidence – and quickly, please.”
And this doesn’t only affect products.
Often, what’s requested is simply a comparable value per unit – depending on what you deliver:
Typical wording we see:
⇢ “CO₂e per product / variant / unit?”
⇢ “CO₂e per order / project / campaign?”
⇢ “CO₂e per shipment / delivery / tonne-km?”
⇢ “CO₂e per user / transaction / computing time?”
⇢ “CO₂e per event / participant?”
Aha: Whether it’s a product or a service – in the end, it usually comes down to a per-unit value that is quickly available and comparable. The label doesn’t matter. Comparability does.
2) The Digital Product Passport reinforces this logic
The DPP will be introduced step by step by product group – the framework regulation (ESPR) has been in force since 18 July 2024. Which products are affected and when will be defined via delegated acts – so it won’t happen all at once.
Batteries are an early, clearly dated use case: for certain battery categories, the “Battery Passport” is scheduled from 18 February 2027.
And here’s the point that matters more in practice than any date:
Even before something becomes mandatory, “de facto voluntary” requirements often emerge – because procurement, key accounts and platforms want standardized data.
What this triggers along the value chain (including for services):
When product information becomes more digital, structured and verifiable, the pressure rises to provide comparable per-performance values – for example for:
⇢ Transport/logistics (per shipment / route)
⇢ Packaging & printing (per unit / order)
⇢ IT/cloud/software operations (per user / usage / instance)
⇢ Assembly/maintenance/service calls (per job / hour / site)
Aha: The DPP is not a “service PCF obligation.” But it makes data requests along the chain faster, more concrete – and often turns into an expectation before any legal duty kicks in.
3) If you only start when you “have to,” you lose time – and repeatability
For products and services alike, we often see the same pattern:
First comes a request for “a CO₂ value.”
Then the search begins: Which system boundary? Which reference unit? Which data source?
And with the next customer, everything starts from scratch again.
The catch:
A one-off value helps briefly. A repeatable approach helps long-term.
Aha: The real effort isn’t the calculation – it’s the improvisation.
If you set up a clean logic early (per unit + documentation), you can deliver faster and more reliably later.
The common thread
So PCFs and per-unit values don’t have to be reinvented every time.
| Step | The question behind it | In short |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | What it’s really about | A PCF is a deliverable value: emissions per product – or for services per unit (e.g., order, shipment, user). That’s how people ask today: comparable, fast, repeatable. |
| 2 | Where market pressure really comes from | Pressure rarely shows up as a “PCF obligation,” but as a request: “Send us footprint/evidence.” Often in tenders, procurement systems and supply chains – including expectations around speed. |
| 3 | Choosing the right reference unit | Unit, kg, m², shipment, hour, user: the reference unit must be stable, traceable and practical. Otherwise the value exists but isn’t usable. |
| 4 | Defining the system boundary | First we define what’s included – and what is deliberately excluded. Better clearly bounded than vaguely comprehensive. That makes values explainable internally and externally. |
| 5 | Deciding on data depth pragmatically | Not everything needs perfection. We define where assumptions are enough – and where primary data is needed. Transparently documented, aligned to effort and use case. |
| 6 | Delivering it in a way that stays repeatable | The most expensive value is the one you can’t repeat. That’s why we deliver PCFs with data logic, documentation and versioning – so Sales/Key Account doesn’t start from zero every time. |
Note: Sequence and depth depend on data availability and the use case.
Calculate a Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) –
robust, comparable, deliverable.
For many companies, a Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) is now more than a “nice to have”: In tenders, procurementand along supply chains, comparable product values are increasingly requested – often as CO₂e per unit, per variantor per service unit. If you can create and reliably deliver a PCF, you stay comparable and able to act when requests come in at short notice.
natureOffice supports companies in calculating PCFs efficiently and setting them up so they remain repeatable: we clarify the reference unit, system boundary, data sources and documentation, and prioritize the products the market asks for first. For implementation, ecozoom provides a PCF software solution that structures data capture and calculation and makes scaling from a single product to a portfolio easier. This results in robust PCF values that aren’t just calculated – they work in everyday reality, in offers, evidence packages and supply-chain processes.