Brenntag : introduces new service to provide business partners with Product Carbon Footprint data to drive sustainability agenda

Brenntag, the global market leader in chemicals and ingredients distribution, has started to provide comprehensive Product Carbon Footprint data (PCF) to customers. This unique service is part of Brenntag's sustainability strategy to promote and enhance transparency about greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to drive reductions across the entire supply chain.

Christian Kohlpaintner, CEO of Brenntag SE: "More and more of our almost 190,000 customers worldwide are taking stronger environmentally conscious purchasing decisions. As the global leader in sustainable distribution, Brenntag cares and takes on responsibility for all ESG aspects, actively fostering the required changes. As a new service we provide Product Carbon Footprint data to further boost transparency about GHG emissions in the value chain of our chemicals and ingredients distribution industry. We offer our business partners the opportunity to assess the products and services they buy from us even better and thus effectively support them in achieving their sustainability goals."

Brenntag calculates the PCF data according to the different stages of the supply chain: The first part represents Brenntag's upstream Scope 3 emissions, from the extraction of resources through the manufacturing of the product up to the plant gate of our suppliers. Brenntag strongly cooperates in this with suppliers and with data providers like Carbon Minds. The share of Brenntag's own emissions (Scope 1 and 2), is subsequently added. Thus, reliable data are provided to customers in alignment with the recently published "Together for Sustainability (TfS) Product Carbon Footprint Guideline". Therefore, Brenntag makes emission reduction opportunities transparent, not only in relation to the manufacturing of the products, but also in relation to logistics and transport.

Andreas Kicherer, Vice President Sustainability Brenntag Group, adds: "Our concept of providing extensive Product Carbon Footprints for our portfolio provides highly valuable answers of how much GHG emissions are associated with a product along its entire life cycle. We are continuously working to enhance this system by further improving the data quality as well as the number of available data points."

Brenntag's service is built on a database that provides PCFs of high quality for a large number of products and has started to provide data to customers in the form of pilot cases. These master data are gradually refined for each product with further details from suppliers. In parallel, integration of these data and creation of specific service offerings are developed to drive automation and scaling.

Climate protection is a focus area of Brenntag's ambitious ESG strategy. Sustainability targets include a self-imposed commitment to net zero emissions by 2045. This includes for instance a complete switch to green electricity by 2025 and the step-by-step replacement of the corporate fleet from combustion engines with low carbon alternatives. In addition, Brenntag has recently signed up to the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) Net-Zero Standards. With the commitment to SBTi Brenntag pledges to develop and present science-based targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.