For every product in Pickler, you can add primary data on the amount of electricity and heat consumed during processing. This makes your footprint calculations more accurate and transparent because the energy use comes directly from your production site rather than estimates or default values.
What data to add
You can add two types of energy data per product:
Electricity per product: measured in kWh
Heat per product: measured in MJ
This data should come from your production site or reliable internal measurements so that it reflects the real energy consumption for producing one unit of your product.
When data is not directly available
In many cases, exact energy use per product is not directly available.
In that case, you need to calculate the total energy consumption per product outside of Pickler first, and then enter the results into the platform.
Here are some common ways to allocate total site energy consumption to individual products:
Production volumes: Divide the total site energy by the number of products produced.
Example: If your factory used 50,000 kWh in a month to produce 10,000 units, you can assign 5 kWh per unit. This works best when energy use is similar across all products.Equipment runtime: Use operating hours per product type if energy use differs across machines or production lines.
Example: If one product type takes twice as long on the same machine, it will be allocated twice the energy compared to a product with shorter processing time.Other logical factors: Use physical attributes like weight, size, or processing time per product batch.
Example: Heavier or larger products might require more energy for heating, molding, or drying steps, so energy use can be allocated proportionally.
The goal is to get as close as possible to reality with the data you have available.
Using physical or process-related factors like these is recommended in ISO 14044 and LCA best practices because they maintain a transparent link between energy use and real production activities.