CARBON FOOTPRINT

CARBON FOOTPRINT

The carbon footprint is currently the most popular way to measure the impact a company or product has on climate change. This measure is used by governments, companies, and individuals alike. For Koskisen, the carbon footprint indicates how much greenhouse gases, or CO²e, are emitted by the company’s business operations. By measuring the carbon footprint, a company can see which business operations result in heavy CO²e emissions. While the carbon footprint is a good indicator of the impact of a company’s operations, it does not capture the entire environmental impact.

Our products’ raw material is renewable material, wood. Wood products store carbon for their entire useful life.  Forty-nine per cent of the mass of wood products is carbon, and they bind an average of one tonne of carbon dioxide for every cubic metre. Carbon is stored in wood products for their entire life cycle, which includes their use, re-use and recycling. Carbon is only released when the wood product is used for energy production or it decomposes.

In 2015, Koskisen Group’s total carbon footprint was 114,056 tons of CO²e. Surprisingly, the most significant factor in Koskisen’s carbon footprint came from materials used to make Koskisen products. Although wood-based materials emit no CO2e, adhesives resulted in significant CO²e emissions. Almost as significant were the emissions caused by logistics, that is the transportation of raw wood to manufacturing facilities, as well as transportation to customers. Koskisen outsources delivery of its products to customers, which means that it does not have direct control over the emissions that come from deliveries. However, it was included in the CO2e footprint in order to give a more holistic view of the true climate impact of Koskisen products. This information is valuable, in that it can facilitate additional efforts throughout the value chain.

Additional facts

• 91% of CO²e impact comes from outgoing logistics (i.e. transport of finished goods to the customer), and 9% comes from transporting raw materials to Koskisen’s manufacturing facilities.
• Internal logistics CO²e emissions included fork-lift trucks and forest machinery
• Heat production from biomass was calculated as zero. Forest products’ CO²e emissions and sequestration factors are a multifaceted issue and considered outside the scope of this study