Extending climate disclosures to circular economy metrics

FootprintLab has been a supporter of Circular Australia from the start and enjoy being a part of the Circular Economy Task Force for Finance and Investment. This is the pitch we were invited to deliver at the Australian Circular Economy Forum today.

Transcript

I’m Janet from FootprintLab. We provide academic data about the hidden impacts of everything everywhere.

Australia’s circular economy framework uses a variety of metrics to measure our circularity, test scenarios and set policy targets.

That’s great for the national level, but wouldn’t it be great to see where your sector, your business or your investment portfolio stands with the same metrics? 

Good news, that is possible today. At FootprintLab, we already provide carbon footprint data about every sector in every country. But did you know that we also have hundreds of material use metrics for every sector in every country. 

Let’s see an example:

Imagine if you had to source all the materials needed for the entire supply chain behind the goods and services produced in our economy. How much would you need to extract from the one person agriculture, forestry, fisheries and mining in your backyard?

If you live in Australia, it’s over 260 kg – represented here by about 300 large potatoes.

We supply this type of data in formats that fit the same workflows businesses already have for carbon accounting, whether they are banks, carbon calculators, or asset managers.

This means that anyone already familiar with carbon accounting, can easily extend that to a circular economy – measuring and managing the amount of materials extracted from the environment along their supply chains.

Behind our material footprint data, we also have hundreds of disaggregations.

Integrating this data into your business data is also great for anticipating exposure to supply chain risk that are typical of our linear economy.

For example, a hot topic is coming shortfalls of critical metals needed for tech. With our data, you can easily see the nickel footprint of your investments to know where the hotspots are. You can also assess the proportion of your material footprint that is non-renewable, or even find out our supply chain wide expenditure on materials that are not raw materials - like plastics.

If you want to learn more, let’s talk!