Communicating the positive environmental impacts - User experiences of the carbon handprint approach

Carbon handprint is a tool to showcase the positive environmental impact, i.e., greenhouse gas emission (GHG) reduction a product or a service has when compared to a baseline offer. Companies whose offer is performing comparably well in terms of GHG emissions can use the carbon handprint to communicate their sustainable performance and positive environmental value of their solution to stakeholders. Carbon handprint is based on the achieved difference of GHG footprints of comparable offerings, and therefore using it requires both data and calculation effort from the offering firm. To better understand the uses, benefits, and challenges of carbon handprint we interviewed seven large companies that already have some years of user experience on the approach. While using predetermined data and calculation method increases the transparency of an environmental claim, the choice of baseline offer can be challenging, especially with niche market products, or innovative solutions with no obvious comparison. Further, the early adopters need to accept the risk that the potential market benefit of using carbon handprint materializes with delay if the stakeholders are not yet familiar with the relatively new concept. In addition to that the results help to develop carbon handprint method further, the study sheds light on the different benefits a company can achieve by adopting proactive environmental practices.