By Jessica Shankleman, Source: BusinessGreen

Researchers in the US have unveiled a ground-breaking Facebook-inspired tool that can rapidly calculate the carbon footprint of thousands of products simultaneously.

Columbia University’s Earth Institute yesterday announced it had created the tool as part of a project designed to help PepsiCo develop standardised calculations of the lifecycle of thousands of its products.

The team, led by researcher Christoph Meinrenken, developed a model that can estimate the carbon emissions of various different materials, and then calculate thousands of footprints within minutes, virtually automatically.

“Companies are not just trying to come up with the environmental impact of products for internal use, but they want to use it as a business tool that they can share,” he told BusinessGreen.

“But it has to make sense financially and it’s not economical for many companies to hire dozens of experts to carry out all the analysis that is required.”

He said the software was inspired by sites such as Facebook, which uses existing data to predict what members will be interested in viewing.

“At companies like Facebook or Netflix engineers employ statistical wizardry to mine vast datasets and essentially teach computers to predict, for instance, who will like a particular movie,” he said.

Meinrenken used similar methods to mine detailed product and supply chain data. For example, when the systems does not know the exact specifications of a product material, it can make a sensible guess based based on previous data.

“For an environmental engineer, using such data to estimate how much the environment will ‘like’ certain products and services is especially rewarding,” he added. “Consumers will be able to make more informed choices.”

Meinrenken predicted the software could potentially save companies significant amounts of time and money by eliminating the need for manual mapping of a product’s ingredients and packaging materials, and could be operated by non-experts.

He added that the university would continue to collaborate with PepsiCo and would also make the underlying methodology and software available to other large companies exploring life-cycle-analysis.

The team is also now looking at transferring the methodology from carbon to other arenas, such as water use.