The following phases are left outside of the scope of Pickler.

Transport of raw material to production facility by truck and container. Influenced by seasonality or price fluctuations, many suppliers source their materials from various locations during the year. This makes it impossible for the packaging supplier to know from which location the raw materials were sourced. Therefore, this transport stage is currently not taken into account, which can lead to an incomplete understanding of the environmental impact of the transport of the product.

To address this issue, companies should work closely with their suppliers to gather more accurate data on the origin and transport of raw materials, so that this information can be incorporated into the sustainability assessments.

Transport from the point of sales to the client and his customers is not taken into account. Since products can be sold to many clients and many different customers, it is hard to have reliable data. Next to that, clients are often close to the point of sales, and therefore the contribution to the overall footprint is neglectable.

The quantity of gas used for the production process is not taken into account.

The filling of the packaging is not included in the analysis since this footprint contributes to the footprint of the product itself and not to the packaging.

The "use" phase cannot be included at this stage, since most packaging can be used for multiple products. Therefore, we always recommend making sure the packaging has a positive effect on the product or its shelf life. Clients that use a product more than once, can make a self-declared functional unit in terms of the number of uses, which is provided in the tool in the comparisons function.

Reusing the packaging can require multiple extra steps like washing and transport, but we prefer to keep things simple. The more numbers you take into this equation, the more evidence you need to provide. And since in many cases, there is not a lot of accurate data available on the washing temperature, the type of detergent or energy consumption of the type of washing machine, we take this out of the equation. If similar products are compared, we assume that they follow the same steps and therefore lead to no significant difference.

"Secondary packaging" or logistic packaging (think for example of the palettes below the transported pile) is also not included in the analysis.

The footprint for collecting, transporting and sorting the waste is kept out of scope since the contribution to the overall footprint is considered very low.