Impact categories are the environmental impact results you get from calculating a product's environmental footprint over its entire lifecycle via a Life Cycle Assessment or LCA method (Pickler's methodology). In Pickler, we cover a packaging's carbon footprint, impact on biodiversity, impact on human health, and impact on material scarcity. These 4 categories are requested by EU legislation like the CSRD.

They help you discover your product's complete impact on the environment - and take action to reduce its biggest impact categories (which isn't always just carbon impact). Multiple impact categories ensure we don't overlook or worsen other big impacts by having tunnel visions on carbon.

The carbon footprint refers to the total greenhouse gas emissions of your packaging, expressed in CO2-eq. Greenhouse gas emissions trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, leading to global warming. This changes the Earth's local, regional, and global climates. As a result, we get extreme weather conditions with devastating economic and social effects (crops destroyed, rivers flooded, social displacement, water scarcity, etc.).

This impact category covers how your product disrupts biodiversity. Our ecosystems are crucial to creating balance in nature. However, our economic activities result in the deforestation and pollution of soil, water, and landscapes. With big consequences for biodiversity loss (species loss), and in turn human health.

This covers how our product's emissions affect human health in terms of cancers or other diseases. For example, air and noise pollution, and emissions from mining/producing heavy metals like mercury are directly related to health issues like asthma, hearing loss, dehydration, and heart diseases.

Material scarcity considers our need and dependency on current and future raw materials. With the impact on material scarcity, we measure in what rate we're depleting our current resources - and how this affects the health of soil, water, biodiversity, etc. For example, over-exploitation of resources such as forests, minerals, and water has resulted in pollution, loss of biodiversity, and soil erosion.

Your footprint results show the biggest impact categories for your packaging product and which part of the product's lifecycle caused it (e.g. certain production processes or raw materials). We call this information 'impact hotspots'.

These impact hotspots show you exactly where you can reduce impact most effectively, and what type of impact you need to reduce. Guiding your reduction focus and actions

For example, "How can I best reduce the carbon emissions in my packaging's material phase?" or "How can I prevent material scarcity in my packaging's material phase?"