Fine tune how you want to view your comparison
Select your indicator
A comparison can be viewed in eco-costs or carbon footprint. Eco-costs give a full picture of the environmental impact, including four impact categories (impact on human health, resources scarcity, climate change and nature). Carbon footprint is a more narrow view, that focussess on the impact of greenhouse gasses.
Select unit of Measure
You can decide to view per piece or per kg.
Per piece tells tells you the environmental impact of an individual product, making it ideal for comparing items sold or used as single units.
Per kg tells you the environmental impact based on weight, useful for bulk materials or products sold by mass.
Select "Per piece" or "Per Kg" to analyze the impact per unit.
Additional configuration
By clicking Configuration you can hide or show two additional options.
Sales price: by adding the sales price, you can unlock the true cost of your product. True costs is the total sum of eco-costs and the sales price. This is a powerful way of showing the product's real cost to society, including both financial expenses and its burden on the planet.
Quantity: This is only available when your unit is set to Per piece. It will multiply the impact with quantity and is a great way of showing the impact of large orders.
Sorting: Depending on your preference, you can sort products from high to low impact or vice versa. Pickler looks at the absolute impact for this, based on the selected indicator (eco-cost or carbon footprint).
Your benchmark product
In every comparison, one product is the benchmark. All other products compare to this product. A benchmark helps you helps you to see whether other products have a higher or lower impact compared to the chosen baseline.
Understanding the data
The eco score
In the product cards, you will find the eco score of every product. The eco score is a simple A+ to G rating, based on eco-costs, that summarizes your product’s overall sustainability performance.
It doesn't give you information about the absolute impact, when adding increasing the quantity. To get a full understanding, you will need to look beyond the eco score.
Impact
This section tells you the impact of your product in actual numbers; either eco-costs or carbon footprint.
Total carbon footprint: When you have selected carbon footprint as indicator, you will find this metric first. It tells you the impact of greenhouse gas emissions. In this example, you see that the first product has a negative number. Read more on how that's possible.
Eco-costs: The total eco-costs for every product in your comparison.
Sales price: The sales price per selected unit of measure
True cost: The sum of the sales price with the eco-costs. The bar tells shows you the share of each.
Understanding the numbers
The table shows you two numbers that help you to understand the difference in impact.
Absolute impact: These are the numbers in black. It's the absolute impact of your product.
Difference in percentage: only show for non-benchmark products, and show how much higher (red) or lower (green) the impact of a product is compared to the benchmark product.
Looking for hotspots
The impact section doesn't tell you where the differences originate from. That's what the stages are for.
Every impact calculation in Pickler is calculated from the bottom up, meaning the total impact is the sum of a calculation of every step in the lifecycle of a product:
Material stage: the environmental impacts associated with raw material extraction and processing.
Production stage: the impacts of manufacturing processes, including energy and resource use.
Transport stage: Environmental effects from transporting materials and products through the supply chain.
End of life stage: the disposal, recycling, or waste treatment of the product after use.
The detailed table shows you these stages and gives you two numbers to understand where the difference is coming from. By looking at the absolute numbers in black and the percentages in red and green you can understand where the difference in total impact is coming from.
It's important to understand that a high percentage increase doesn't always translate to a significant total impact. For example, in the production stage, €0.00001 compared to €0.0004 is a 3900% increase. However, if the total product impact is €0.043 compared to €0.039, the production stage's percentage increase is marginal and not a major hotspot to prioritize.
It's therefor best practice to use the percentage as a rough guide and pay close attention to the absolute numbers in black to understand where to focus on first.
Diving deeper
When you identify a hotspot and want to understand why it has such an impact, simply click on the stage to view detailed data. Click Show More to access the underlying sources, including research and assumptions used in the calculations.
Troubleshooting your results
It can still be that you have your comparison results - but don't really understand them or feel it's not correct.
First of all, make sure you are familiar with how to troubleshoot your comparison results.
You can also ask for support via our chat. Either talk with us, or make use of our AI functionality (directly in the chat) to ask your question. Our AI chat has access to our database, by asking the question in the right way, it is a powerful tool to answer your questions instantly.
To succesfully use AI, make sure to use of the names that are also used in the IDEMAT database.
For example, you have two products side by side with PET amorphous and Post-consumer Recycled PET. Then you can ask: Why is PET amorphous worse than Post-consumer Recycled PET. You will likely get a useful answer; and if not just click talk to a person.
Now you're ready to leverage Pickler's Comparisons to make data-driven decisions and drive sustainable packaging innovation!