Add-on · Beyond carbon
The impacts they ask about after carbon
A footprint answers one question well. The next questions arrive quickly: how much land, how much water, what it does downstream, and whether anyone would be uncomfortable with where it came from. The same inventory answers all of them, characterised differently.
Two of these are not new
Land and water are already on every footprint
Land occupation and water use are calculated today, product by product, through the same tree that produces the carbon number. Water already aggregates across a portfolio weighted by the volumes you actually sell. They are not an extension we are proposing; they are results already sitting behind the number you look at.
The rest of this page covers the other impact categories the add-on reports, and why each one can be evidenced.
What we can stand behind
Six things the inventory already supports
Land occupation
Square metres of agricultural land per year, per kilogram of product. Already calculated on every footprint, and already required in hectares by the land-sector rules that apply from January 2027.
Water use
Irrigation water is modelled at the farm and already rolls up across a portfolio weighted by what you sell. Scarcity weighting adds the part that matters: a litre in southern Spain is not a litre in Ireland.
Acidification
Driven by ammonia from fertiliser and manure, and by combustion in the field and the factory. The farm model already carries the inputs; the characterisation factors are public and standard.
Eutrophication
Nitrogen and phosphorus reaching fresh and coastal water. Fertiliser, manure and crop data are already modelled per hectare, which is where this calculation starts.
Pesticide use intensity
Kilograms of active substance per hectare, split by insecticide, herbicide, fungicide, mineral and plant-derived. A physical fact the farm model already carries, useful for comparing practice between origins, and deliberately not dressed up as a toxicity score.
Sourcing due diligence
Every ingredient already resolves to a commodity and a country of origin. Matched against the public forced and child labour lists, that becomes a flag your procurement team can act on and an auditor can trace to its source.
Why it is not a new model
One inventory, characterised several ways
An impact category is not a separate dataset. It is the same physical inventory multiplied by a different set of characterisation factors. The expensive part of any of this is knowing what actually happened on the farm and in the factory, and that is the part we already have.
Per hectare and per year, the farm model carries yield, irrigation water, nitrogen, phosphate and phosphorus, manure by animal type, ammonia, pesticide quantity and the energy used to run the irrigation. That is the substrate every metric on this page is built from, and the factor sets that turn it into land, water, acidification and eutrophication results are published and standard rather than proprietary.
- No new supplier questionnaire: the activity data is already collected
- Public, citable characterisation factors rather than a house method
- The same Primary Data Share on every metric, so you know how well each one is evidenced
- Results roll up by product, category and portfolio the way the carbon number already does
Where we stop
What we deliberately do not offer
Breadth is easy to sell and hard to defend. These are the metrics we could put on a page tomorrow and could not stand behind in a review, so we do not.
Toxicity scores
We hold pesticide use by class rather than by individual active substance, and characterisation factors differ between substances by orders of magnitude, so a class average cannot honestly become a toxicity result. You get the use intensity, not a toxicity claim.A biodiversity score
There is no agreed method. Every score on the market is a proxy, usually derived from land use. We would rather give you the land occupation and the origin, which is the input to any of those methods, than a number whose methodology you would have to defend.One weighted score
Collapsing many categories into a single figure hides the trade-off you opened the report to see, and publishing it as a marketing claim is getting more exposed under EU rules, not less.A labour rating per product
A commodity and country risk list is solid evidence for due diligence and a poor basis for grading an individual supplier. We give you the flag and the source, not a score with a decimal point on it.Which of these does your customer actually ask for?
Beyond carbon is an add-on to the footprints you already have. Tell us which question you are being asked and we will show you the answer on your own products.
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