Hybrid Carbon Footprint

Hybrid Carbon Footprints are a significant advance in terms of speed and accuracy of carbon foot printing.

There are 3 ways of calculating the carbon footprint of a product or organisation:

  • Input - Output models (Fast low cost provides good coverage)
  • PAS 2050/process models (Slow very high cost poor coverage and subject to boundary disputes)
  • Hybrid models (uses a mixture of process and input output models to get the benefits of both Input-Output and Process based models.)

In the majority of cases Input - Output models are more than good enough and provide a good first level calculation of carbon footprints.  For products that are used in very high volume, a second or third level calculation is appropriate and this is where hybrid models come in to their own, by providing another level of accuracy.