Measure Emissions

The first pillar of Tratos’ CO2 strategy is about measuring the carbon footprint that a product has throughout its life cycle. Tratos believes that the first step to promote sustainable development and to positively impact the environment is to become aware of the level of emission that a company itself brings into the environment with its products. It is by measuring that a company starts having a true and concrete understanding of the impact that the company itself has on the environment, this first measuring stage allows that company to act upon the impact produced.

The Carbon Footprint represents the value of greenhouse gas emissions generated through the entire life cycle of a product or service, during a given period. For the calculation of the carbon footprint of the product, the boundaries are established according to the life cycle of the product and therefore include all the production processes and services related to the product, starting from the extraction and production of raw materials, passing from the manufacture of the product and ending with the use and end of life phase. Usually, the analysis is carried out using a gate-to-gate approach. Therefore, the downstream transport process to the final customer is not taken into consideration in the calculation.

Tratos has measured all the emissions produced by all of its cables during their life cycles in order to have an overview of the level of emission produced by the company and to understand how to reduce those emissions. While measuring the impact of its cables Tratos realised the importance of proximity and location of end-users of the product. Indeed, Tratos’ analysis revealed that transportation can massively increase the level of CO2 emitted, therefore, if a company would like to truly be sustainable and promote sustainability, it is necessary that products sold or bought by the company are as close as possible to the production site. 

To demonstrate the aforementioned point, it is reported below a part of a study that Tratos has conducted for one of its cables. While measuring the environmental impact of its cable, Tratos deemed it appropriate to take into account and measure the emission produced in the transportation of its product from the production site to the that make a specific assessment in terms of transport to the end customer. 

Three different scenarios were created about a cable that has to be transported from a Tratos factory to the end user of the cable:

• From Tratos factory in Pieve Santo Stefano (Italy) to Glasgow (by road)
• From a hypothetical production site in Calcutta to Glasgow (by ship)
• From a hypothetical production site in Shanghai to Glasgow (by ship)

When assessing the emission factor the company considered the data supplied by the UK Government in the document “UK Government – GHG Conversion Factors for Company Reporting”.

For each of the three cases these are the data, sources and elements that have  been taken into consideration: 

For each of the cases, the worst-case scenario has been hypothesized.  This worst-case scenario happens when the transport of the cable brings the greatest number of CO2 values, cable cod.200293 – Aluminium Xlpe Pvc 1 kV 2X50(1.5)+60. The weight of the same is about 537 kg/km and in the year 2018, it is estimated the production of about 256.38 km, equal to 137,676.06 kg of cable.

Below the contribution in terms of CO2 equivalent tons referred to the 3 distinct cases is reported.

It is evident from the small amount of data that are reported above that the analysis that when Tratos measured CO2 emissions it emerges that there are two crucial factors to keep into account. Indeed, when measuring and evaluating CO2 emissions, the origin of the product and the proximity of the product to the clients/customers that will use that product appear to be paramount. It is evident how to lower CO2 emissions it is crucial to keep the product close to its end-users; only in this way, the CO2 emissions of the product will not massively increase because of transportation processes. 

When producing and selling a product is therefore paramount, in order to allow such a product to have a low/lower environmental impact, to make sure that that product is, after its production, sold and used by someone that is proximate to the product itself. 

Therefore when you start to measure you start to realise what is sustainable or not, you start to understand what makes a product and thus a company sustainable

Find out more about Tratos Environmental measures in the Environmental section in our policies procedures and statements that you can access from below.