Are Product Carbon Footprint standards outpacing suppliers?

As climate commitments continue and regulatory expectations increase, companies face growing pressure to measure and reduce the carbon footprint of their products. At the heart of this challenge lies the need for high-quality, product-level emissions data, and a consistent way to interpret and share it.

In response, Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) standards and methodologies are rapidly evolving.

Emerging frameworks like PACT, Catena-X, and Together for Sustainability (TfS) are helping to bring structure and comparability to how companies calculate and share PCF data across their supply chains. These standards are designed not just to support more reliable reporting but to help provide both buyers and suppliers the insights needed to drive decarbonization decisions.

But the growing demand for PCFs, combined with the evolution of standards has a cost. Companies face complexity with a shift from organizational level to product level data. Will the evolution in quality and transparency expectations for PCF data represent a genuine benefit for customers and suppliers? 

Let’s find out.

The current state of PCF standards

The GHG Protocol Product Standard, published by WRI and WBCSD in 2011, has served as the leading cross-industry reference for building and reporting PCFs. While this standard was a major step forward, practitioners and stakeholders have increasingly called for stronger guidance to improve consistency, comparability, and data sharing across the supply chain.

Image shared by PACT

Initiatives like PACT have emerged to help address these gaps. PACT now stands as the leading sector-agnostic methodology for calculating PCFs and offers a set of technical specifications for the interoperable exchange of product-level emissions data. Sector-specific standards, such as Catena-X for the automotive industry and Together for Sustainability (TfS) for the chemical sector, build on the same principles, but offer tailored guidance for industry-specific decisions that influence how PCFs are calculated.

Together, these frameworks provide much-needed structure, clarity, and credibility for carbon footprinting efforts, and represent an important milestone in the journey toward harmonised, high-quality PCF data.

However, they also introduce a new level of complexity that many suppliers struggle to navigate.

What began as foundational guidance based on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) principles has evolved into a complex network of standards and data requirements. For example, many methodologies require suppliers to report biogenic emissions separately when their contribution is expected to be significant. This presents real challenges for suppliers, as many emission factor datasets lack the granularity needed to separately report land use emissions, agricultural emissions, or CO₂ emissions from the combustion of biofuels.

Another challenge is the requirement to report data quality ratings, which obliges suppliers to assess the technological, geographical, and temporal representativeness, as well as the completeness and reliability of their input data. While this provides important insights into the underlying quality and credibility of a PCF, it can be a time-consuming task for suppliers, who must understand the assumptions behind the emission factors to make these assessments accurately.

These requirements create data gaps that cannot be easily addressed.

Some methodologies, such as the recently released PACT Methodology Version 3, address the issue of limited supplier data accessibility by being more lenient regarding the data points required for a PACT-aligned PCF. However, many similar standards have yet to follow suit. PACT continues to collaborate with sector-specific initiatives like Catena-X and TfS to ensure cross-industry alignment, which will help over time. Until then, suppliers following these standards will continue to need additional support.

Are standards outpacing suppliers?

The landscape for building PCFs at scale looks very different today than it did a decade ago.

What was once a daunting task has become even more challenging.

Think of it like a mountain range.

Each new methodology update, data requirement, or rule change adds another peak to climb. While the climb was manageable before, the summit is now further away, requiring more time, coordination, and cross-functional effort to reach.

For many suppliers, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the journey hasn’t even started. They’re stuck at base camp, unsure how to begin or how to assemble the resources needed for the climb. 

Unlike larger companies that are more likely to have established data collection methods and can access data quickly, SMEs are starting from scratch. They must collect, structure, and interpret emissions data while learning the PCF process itself, often without dedicated expertise.

This creates a fundamental problem: Today’s standards raise the bar for what counts as credible PCF data but offer little recognition of the journey it takes to get there.

What’s missing is an accepted intermediate stage. A more accessible entry point for less mature suppliers to work toward. A ‘lite’ version of the standards.

The ambition to scale makes the problem even harder. Instead of being asked for a few PCFs covering select products, which might take months to complete, suppliers may soon be expected to have PCFs for large portions of their product portfolios. For resource-limited teams, this is a huge ask.

One of the reasons this gap exists is representation.

SMEs rarely have the expertise or time to engage in the technical communities and initiatives that shape these standards. The result is that these working groups are often dominated by representatives from large organizations with well-established PCF programs and dedicated in-house expertise. The result is that the practical needs and constraints of smaller suppliers often go unheard, and unaddressed. What feels achievable to experienced practitioners may be an insurmountable barrier to those just starting out.

As the standards progress, SMEs are left with limited options: either hire expensive consultants or invest in software and tools that may be out of budget, and out of reach without internal expertise. Unsurprisingly, this slows adoption and limits the flow of shared PCF data across supply chains.

At Manufacture 2030, 74% of suppliers we work with say they are at the beginning of their PCF journey. They are unlikely to have easy access to the required data or useful secondary emission factors and may not feel equipped to engage their own suppliers for essential upstream PCFs to help with PCF creation. 

Many suppliers are being left behind.

So how can Manufacture 2030 help supplier make the climb?

To scale product carbon footprinting across global supply chains, suppliers need to be supported to climb the ‘PCF mountain’ in achievable stages. 

Rather than aiming for perfection from the outset, they need to be supported to start, sharing what they can, focusing on the products or categories that matter most, and building from there.

Prioritising high-impact or easier-to-complete products can deliver early wins, helping suppliers identify emissions hotspots and potential decarbonization opportunities. Requiring full assurance statements, extensive data quality indicators, or even the inclusion of biogenic emission sources too early in the process can create unnecessary roadblocks, with limited immediate benefit to either the supplier or the buying organization.

At Manufacture 2030, we believe suppliers should be taken on a journey. One that starts with good-enough data and builds toward high-quality, scalable PCF generation over time. For that to happen, suppliers need the right tools, training, and time. 

The most effective support includes: 

• Non-expert tools that simplify PCF creation and include accessible resources to make learning PCF fundamentals easier.
• PCF request mechanisms that help suppliers know exactly what’s being asked of them and how to respond.
• Guided PCF generation that avoids the blank-page problem, with structured workflows and access to trusted emission factors.
• Simple, familiar formats for data sharing that reduce the burden for suppliers with limited digital infrastructure.
• Flexible customer expectations that allow suppliers to meet a meaningful subset of the standards now with more complex requirements moved to a later phase.

Standards and methodology creators must keep the supplier experience in focus. That means defining a realistic, starting point for participation. One that reflects the diversity of capabilities across global supply chains. Without this, progress will be limited to those who can afford the tools, expertise, and time to meet increasing demands of standards.

If we want PCFs to be truly impactful, they need to be both accessible and scalable.

The journey starts by meeting suppliers where they are...and helping them climb with confidence.