What is a Climate Declaration?
A climate declaration contains information on greenhouse gas emissions of a product throughout its entire life cycle (i.e. from production to consumption and disposal of the product).
What is the Advantage of a Climate Declaration?
- You as a consumer can check the overall climate impact of a product.
- You get information about processes that contribute most to the climate impact.
- The climate declaration allows you to compare the climate impact of different products.
- You can adjust your lifestyle in a way to consume more climate-friendly products.
It is important to make comparisons between products in the same group and not between different products. That is, if you want to buy meat for dinner, you need to compare different types of meat, as beef, pork and chicken. Comparisons between beef, a strawberry yogurt and a box of handkerchiefs are not useful. By comparing which meat is the most climate-friendly alternative (i.e. has the lowest CO2 emissions), you can do something for the climate by choosing this product.
CO2 Equivalents (CO2e)
The emission of greenhouse gases is measured in CO2 equivalents, abbreviated CO2e. CO2e is a unit to combine and compare all greenhouse gases. Therefore, the impact of each greenhouse gas on the greenhouse effect is compared with the impact of carbon dioxide (CO2). The conversion factors for the relevant greenhouse gases are:
| Carbon Dioxide: | 1 kg CO2 | = | 1 kg CO2e |
| Methane: | 1 kg CH4 | = | 25 kg CO2e |
| Nitrous Oxide: | 1 kg N2O | = | 310 kg CO2e |
For simplicity, we often use only the term “CO2 emissions”, but meant and calculated are always CO2e, the total emissions of greenhouse gases.
climatop
To make such a comparison for each product is very time consuming. Therefore, climatop marks the best products with the label "approved by climatop". This label indicates that a product has got a lower CO2 impact in comparison to other, similar items.