Carbon Handprint

Abstract

A carbon handprint is a new approach developed to quantify the positive climate impact of products and services. In contrast to carbon footprint, which refers to negative global warming potential as a consequence of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions over the life cycle of a product, a carbon handprint indicates the reduced amount of greenhouse gas emissions due to the use of a specific product or a service. A carbon handprint can be thus defined as the beneficial climate impact that organizations can achieve and communicate by providing products or services that reduce the carbon footprints of customers (Grönman et al., 2019). Carbon handprint builds upon the assumption that reducing the product’s carbon footprint alone is not a handprint. Carbon handprint can be achieved in a provider–customer relationship, when the provided goods, intermediate product, raw material, service, technology, etc. (hereafter: a product), that a customer uses, serves to reduce the customer’s carbon footprint when compared to a baseline practice. A carbon handprint, therefore, is always a carbon footprint calculation of the modified situation against the baseline situation: see Figure 1. Carbon handprint can be used in the communicating and marketing of global warming reduction potential as well as in identifying the development needs of a product.