Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Production Facilities
Improved measurement methods of companies' emissions within their supply chains are required in order to be able to more accurately evaluate their environmental impact. This is a result of the increased demand from customers and stakeholders who demand that companies act to reduce their emissions and increase their sustainability thinking. Measuring sustainability and emissions can be challenging when external parties further down the supply chain are included due to, for example, the availability of information and data. The following article provides an insight into the thesis Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Production Facilities, a work carried out together with Ericsson with the aim of evaluating how their external production suppliers work with sustainability in order to create an idea of Ericsson's total carbon footprint, focusing on facilities in the supply chain.
Today, sustainability is often not measured from a holistic perspective, which is important for understanding the entirety of a company's emissions. Ericsson is therefore interested in understanding the total amount of emissions along its supply chain, and thus this degree project was conducted to evaluate two of their suppliers' emissions and sustainability work related to their production facilities. These two suppliers are responsible for Ericsson's outsourced production and are two global companies that offer production solutions to several different customers, of which Ericsson is one of these.
Since several products for different customers are produced in the facilities in which Ericsson's products are produced, the emissions need to be distributed to correctly represent Ericsson's share of the emissions. This distribution was made in this thesis via a revenue-based method. The results showed that the share of emissions between Ericsson and these two suppliers did not correspond to the share of production for which they are responsible, which can be seen in the figure below. Due to the fact that the revenue-based method used is evaluated, the results are evaluated to have low accuracy. In order to increase the accuracy of the result, other methods are proposed to be used, such as an activity-based method. However, this requires Ericsson to have access to more data and information from their suppliers. During the course of the work, some difficulties arose in collecting data from the suppliers, which shows that the relationship between Ericsson and the suppliers needs to be developed in order to increase their willingness to cooperate and trust. Ericsson also needs to develop the collaboration between their supply and sourcing departments to improve, for example, requirements within contracts and general follow-up activities related to sustainability. Several recommendations were made to Ericsson based on three categories; sustainability work, distribution methods and increased information sharing.
Authors: Marion Andersson & Moa Lubell
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