ISO 14067: calculating a product carbon footprint and making claims about it

ISO 14067 is the standard for calculating and reporting a product’s carbon footprint. Because it focuses on a single impact category it is not a full life cycle assessment; it inherits the rules of ISO 14044 but reduces the result to climate change. That simplification is both its strength and its limit.

What it inherits from ISO 14044

The functional unit definition, system boundary setting, allocation hierarchy, data quality requirements and cut-off rules come straight from ISO 14044. A carbon footprint is therefore not “LCA lite”; it demands the same methodological rigour, only the result table has one row.

It also carries the classic risk of single-indicator accounting: burden shifting. A material change that lowers the carbon footprint may raise water consumption or toxicity, and a single-indicator report will not show it. ISO 14067 acknowledges that risk and asks that the result not be used on its own to claim environmental superiority.

Biogenic carbon and land use

ISO 14067 requires biogenic carbon inputs and outputs to be reported separately. Carbon bound into the product is tracked as negative, carbon released by combustion or decay as positive. Emissions from land use change are also reported as a separate line — for agricultural and forest products that line can change the total entirely.

That split parallels EN 15804+A2’s threefold GWP structure: fossil, biogenic and land use. Although the two standards serve different contexts, they share the same methodological logic; where an ISO 14067 calculation exists for a product, the EPD’s GWP rows largely rest on the same basis.

Partial carbon footprint

ISO 14067 calls a calculation covering only part of the life cycle a “partial carbon footprint” and treats it as legitimate — provided the boundary is stated explicitly. A cradle-to-gate figure is the natural choice for a producer selling intermediate goods; for a final consumer product, excluding the use stage distorts what the number means.

Claim limits and greenwashing risk

The calculation is a technical exercise; communication is a separate responsibility. Using an ISO 14067 result in marketing falls under the environmental claim rules of the ISO 14020 series. Statements such as “carbon neutral” require the offsetting mechanism to be disclosed; relative statements such as “low carbon” require the comparison basis to be stated.