Blowing out a candle on the Carbon Footprint of a product

On 20th August 2018 the ISO standard 14067 has been published, the international standard regarding the Carbon Footprint of a product. We think that the best way to celebrate together this occasion is to take stock of what happened during last year.

First of fall, it is necessary to thank again all the members of the ISO working group, which I had the honor and the pleasure to coordinate with the co-chair Harmke Immink and the Secretary Ben Hedley, without whose expertise and determination nothing of this would have been possible.
At the beginning of the works, in 2015, we were all aware that the challenge was not easy, knowing the difficulties met in the previous ISO process that led to the development of the homonymous Technical Specification.

And yet, a great group of experts, highly prepared and motivated, has reached the final result even earlier than the deadline provided by ISO and in an atmosphere of perfect cooperation.
During this year I had several opportunities to introduce the contents and the potential of ISO 14067 in Asia, America and Europe (and also within COP24 in Katowice), always experiencing a great interest toward a tool that the market felt the need of and that can create great opportunities of collaboration throughout the products’ value chain. It’s a fact that climate change has reached such a high level of evidence and impact to push more and more the economic world to develop strategies and mitigation actions at organization level (with the “complementary” standard ISO 14064-1, published in 2018 as well) and, indeed, at products level, with ISO 14067.

Meanwhile, the CFP programmes that made the first steps with the ISO/TS have consolidated. New ones have started, among which Carbon Footprint Italy that has experienced the first registrations, and there are others under development, such as the Costarica’s one, that should extend its range to the whole Central and South America.
A lot has already been done in one year only, but we expect that even more will happen throughout next year, with the consolidation of the carbon management policies in the companies in all the world, to face in a quick and efficient way the mitigation actions about the GHGs that cannot be transferred to a distant future.
We’ll talk about this again for sure next year, to verify how much of this prediction will actually have happened.

For now… Happy birthday, ISO 14067!