Understanding comparisons

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 focusses on the impact of greenhouse gasses.

Changing this toggle, changes all numbers in your comparison,

You can decide to view per piece or per kg.

Select "Per piece" or "Per Kg" to analyze the impact per unit.

If your products have multiple packaging levels (e.g. pack, case, pallet), you can compare impacts per level using Compare on level.

The selected level becomes the reference (= 1). All other levels scale automatically based on how many products fit in each layer. This keeps comparisons fair—whether you compare per product, per case, or per pallet.

Example

Your product contains 20 products per pack, 300 products per case, 19200 per pallet.

Default product level view:

If you change the level to Pallet, we count 1 pallet as the reference. The other layers scale with it:

This way, both the carbon footprint and eco-costs scale correctly to the packaging level you’re comparing.

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).

Sorting is not saved when you share a comparison.

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.

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.

This section tells you the impact of your product in actual numbers; either eco-costs or carbon footprint.

The table shows you two numbers that help you to understand the difference in impact.

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:

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.

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.

Shows you how much primary, secondary or default data was used in your product. If there are data gaps, it also shows here. Data quality helps you to understand how reliable your results are and where you can improve your data to make your impact calculations more accurate.

The sum of the sales price and the eco-costs. The bar shows the share of each.

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!