After receiving the “Explanation for the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Measurement Result of DaChan Food (Asia) Limited”, Mr. Mark Han Jia-Hwan, the Chairman of the Board of DaChan Food (Asia) Limited DaChan Food (hereinafter referred to as “DaChan Food”), has known the answer perfectly well. In the food industry, DaChan Food volunteers to be the vanguard to complete the “enterprise carbon calculation” in food industry.
“We know what happened”. The measurement shows that in the year of 2009, the GHG emission of DaChan Food in the year of 2009 was 159,000 tons, among which the CO2 generated during the consumption of electricity the application of electricity accounted for 99.94% of the total emission, and the N2O came in the second place, accounting for 0.05% of the total emission.
The result also reveals that the direct GHG emission came from the general GHG emission sources in the daily operations of different companies and factories, including the combustion of petroleum and diesel oil by the means of transportation and electricity generators and the disperse of chicken feeding and septic tanks of employees.
How is carbon calculation processed?
From the end of last year to last month, Mr. SONG Chao, the Assistant Manager of the Department of Public Relationship of DaChan Food, was busy with the enterprise carbon calculation without a single halt. He accompanied the third professional organization to the frontline system to analyze different production processes, collect data and make carbon calculation in accordance with a complete set of thorough assessment standards.
No one, even its major clients such as KFC and Dicos, has ever asked the Company that offers to the market 200 million chickens every year to do this. However, DaChan Food believes that those who act first in sorting out the problem of the carbon information of its company and reduce GHG emission will be the strongest. “This will be one of our competitive advantages”. DaChan Food’s calculation of its GHG emission has been made by reference to the Greenhouse Gas Measuring Protocol, the internationally recognized measurement tool jointly developed by World Resource Institute and World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and in compliance with the procedures of ISO 14064-1 Standards that is developed by International Organization for Standardization.
In short, what comes first in the carbon calculation is to confirm the boundary of an enterprise. That is to say, to confirm the business copes of an enterprise, to determine what kind of businesses of an enterprise can be included in the list and what percentage of each business that can be included in the list, and to decide what kind of emission sources can be included in the list and how to categorize the emissions.
After the confirmation of the business scopes of an enterprise, what to do next is to confirm the emission sources of the enterprise. The following procedures include the collection of data, step-by-step calculation, summary and completion of carbon calculation.
The GHG emission that an enterprise needs to analyze includes the emission by factories and the emission by externally purchased energy. The emission by factories include the emission sources that an enterprise owns or controls covering the GHG emission generated during the consumption of electricity, heat, steam or other energy generated by fossil fuel, the emission sources generated during the course of manufacture, the raw materials, products, wastes and employees’ transportation that are under the control of an enterprise, and the fugitive GHG emission resources.
The emission by externally purchased energy means GHG emission during the consumption of externally purchased electricity, heat and steam consumed by an enterprise itself and the GHG emission generated during the consumption of electricity, heat, steam or other energy generated by fossil fuel.
Mr. SONG Chao says that the confirmation of emission sources needed the spot investigation of every production procedure of an enterprise, but the collection of data was easier than imagined: for example, there is statistical data or financial proof of electricity consumption; according to the formula in the assessment standard, you will easily get the amount of CO2 emission by multiplying the electricity consumption with a coefficient.
Next comes the carbon footprint
How much CO2 has been released during the production of a bag of chicken meat products that a consumer purchases? As Mark Han plans, in the very near future, consumers can find the label of carbon footprint on the package of DaChan Food’s products. After knowing what happened, Mark Han decides to go on with the implementation of his plans.
Different from the confirmation of the boundary of carbon calculation, carbon footprint takes products as the center and focuses on the appraisal of the product life cycle. For example, DaChan Food has outsourced all its logistic services, so at the time to make the enterprise carbon calculation, the GHG emission generated in the supply of logistic services is not calculated as the emission released by DaChan Food. However, under the condition of carbon footprint, the GHG emission generated in the supply of logistic services will be calculated as the emission released by DaChan Food and shown on the labels of products.
The analysis of carbon footprint data is still under way. DaChan Food has been busy with the communication and discussion with some energy performance contracting companies to start the project of electricity generation using chicken manure methane and work out carbon neutral plan.
Carbon management is not hard
As the direct participant of enterprise carbon management, Mr. SONG Chao honestly commented that time and sense of responsibility are two important things for carbon management. At present, carbon management is not a mandatory requirement in the society, so an enterprise’s special allocation of its human resources and time to fulfill the task may be considered as a fool’s errand sometimes. An enterprise’s advocate and promotion of carbon-related affairs are essentially to satisfy the strategic thinking or hobbies of the head of an enterprise for the time being.
At the carbon management training class sponsored by Alxa SEE Ecological Association (SEE) a while ago, 2/3 of participating enterprises said that they had grasped the carbon calculation processes.
What pleases DaChan Food is that though the prices of its products are 10% to 15% percent higher than those of products of the same kind, yet consumers are more than willing to purchase DaChan Food’s products.
