CarbonQuota has launched Quanterra, a new platform designed to generate Product Carbon Footprints from packaging specifications and existing manufacturing data.
The platform initially focuses on Product Carbon Footprinting (PCF), while functionality to support Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) reporting is also in development.
Ahead of its launch, Quanterra has been tested across the packaging sector, including with brands and businesses involved in labels, folding cartons and flexible packaging, as well as primary, secondary and tertiary packaging.
Perhaps the more interesting aspect of the technology is how it approaches the collection of data.
Many environmental platforms rely on users entering information into predefined forms and fields. Quanterra uses AI to interpret information that already exists within a business, including CAD files, product specifications and process data files, alongside a guided chat that can collect or clarify additional information where required.
For packaging businesses, this is potentially significant because much of the information needed to calculate a footprint already exists within technical specifications and production systems. The challenge is often extracting and structuring it for environmental reporting, rather than collecting it for the first time.
The role of AI is also relatively specific. It is used to read, interpret and structure packaging and manufacturing information, but it does not provide the environmental impact factors or calculate their environmental significance.
That intelligence comes from CarbonQuota’s proprietary database of environmental impact factors, which has been developed over a number of years alongside its environmental science and calculation methodologies. In effect, AI interprets the specification, while CarbonQuota’s data and methodology determine the environmental impact.
Quanterra is not CarbonQuota’s first route to automated Product Carbon Footprinting. The company has offered API and integrated carbon calculation services for several years and works with industry technology providers including Esko, ePS, CAI and PrintVis.
Those solutions allow carbon calculations to be incorporated directly into existing business and production systems. Quanterra is aimed at providing a different entry point, offering access through a lower-cost, self-service cloud platform without requiring an API integration or implementation project.
“There is already a huge amount of useful information sitting within packaging specifications and manufacturing systems,” said Dominic Harris, Co-founder of CarbonQuota. “AI allows us to interpret and structure that information without asking users to manually enter everything again. The environmental intelligence, however, comes from the data, science and methodology we have built over many years.”
While Product Carbon Footprinting is available in Quanterra now, EPR and PPWR reporting capabilities remain in development for future releases. CarbonQuota is also planning to extend the platform into other areas of environmental reporting.
The longer-term proposition is that the same underlying packaging, material and manufacturing data could support several environmental reporting requirements. Rather than repeatedly asking businesses to collect new data, the opportunity may be to make better use of the information the packaging industry already generates.