Quality Gurus
- Sustainability
- Environment & Energy
Corporate carbon reporting answers "what does our organisation emit?" A growing set of buyers — construction clients, retailers, industrial procurement teams — is asking a harder question: "what does this product emit?" Answering it requires a different discipline. ISO 14067 governs the product carbon footprint (PCF); ISO 14025 governs the Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) that communicates it credibly. For manufacturers facing green-procurement requirements, these are becoming the certifications that keep you on the tender list.
Here is what each involves and how it differs from the corporate footprint work most organisations start with.
Product footprint vs corporate footprint
A corporate footprint (GHG Protocol, ISO 14064-1) allocates a year's emissions to the organisation. A product footprint (ISO 14067) allocates emissions to a functional unit of product — one tonne of cement, one square metre of tile, one garment — across a defined life-cycle boundary. The methodology is life-cycle assessment (LCA), and the boundary choice is decisive:
- Cradle-to-gate — raw materials through to your factory gate. The most common industrial scope, and what most B2B buyers request.
- Cradle-to-grave — the full life cycle including use and end-of-life, required where downstream phases dominate impact.
The difficulty jumps relative to a corporate inventory because product footprints demand allocation: a factory making five products from shared energy, shared processes and shared logistics must defensibly apportion emissions to each. Weak allocation is where product footprints lose credibility, and where verifiers focus.
What ISO 14067 requires
ISO 14067 sets the rules for quantifying a product carbon footprint consistent with LCA principles (ISO 14040/14044): defined functional unit and system boundary, life-cycle inventory of inputs and outputs, application of characterisation factors, transparent treatment of allocation and data quality, and a report that a third party can assess. The recurring hard parts:
- Primary vs secondary data. Your own measured process data is primary; database emission factors for purchased inputs are secondary. More primary data means a more credible, and usually lower, footprint — but more measurement effort.
- Upstream data from suppliers. Embedded emissions in purchased materials often dominate a cradle-to-gate footprint, which means chasing supplier data — the same supply-chain data challenge CBAM creates, and frequently the same suppliers.
What ISO 14025 adds: the EPD
An EPD is a verified, standardised, comparable environmental declaration for a product — a "nutrition label" for environmental impact, of which carbon is usually the headline. ISO 14025 defines the framework: EPDs are built on Product Category Rules (PCRs) that fix the methodology for a product type so that two manufacturers' EPDs are genuinely comparable, and they are independently verified and registered through a programme operator. In construction especially — where EPDs feed green-building schemes like LEED and are increasingly tender-mandatory — a registered EPD is becoming table stakes for supplying major projects.
The relationship is layered: ISO 14067 produces the carbon number, LCA (14040/14044) provides the method underneath, the relevant PCR constrains the choices, and ISO 14025 governs how the resulting EPD is declared and verified.
Where manufacturers should start
- Establish the corporate inventory first. A product footprint draws on process and energy data that a corporate GHG inventory already systematises. Starting at product level without that foundation means building the data infrastructure twice.
- Pick the product that matters commercially. Do not attempt the whole catalogue. Choose the product a buyer is actually asking about, or your flagship, and do it properly.
- Find the PCR early. If an EPD is the goal, the Product Category Rules for your product type dictate boundary, allocation and data requirements — read them before collecting data, not after.
- Build for verification. Both ISO 14067 footprints and ISO 14025 EPDs derive their value from independent verification. Documented methodology, traceable data and defensible allocation from the outset avoid costly rework at verification.
Practical steps
Confirm what your buyers actually want — a PCF number, or a registered EPD? They are different deliverables with different effort. Ensure your corporate carbon data foundation exists first. Then scope a single product against the relevant PCR. QG delivers product carbon footprints, EPD preparation and the corporate inventories beneath them for manufacturers in Egypt and the region, built for verification from day one.