Bayreuth researchers want to calculate the carbon footprint of companies more precisely in the future. The term “carbon footprint” refers to the recording of greenhouse gases that affect the climate and their compilation in a greenhouse gas balance. For more precise calculations, Nora Kuhn compared 8,500 products in her bachelor's thesis at the Department of Environmental Production Technology (LUP) at the University of Bayreuth with the support of Dr. Bernd Rosemann, academic director of the LUP, and Dominik Roppelt, Nora Kuhn's bachelor's thesis supervisor and doctoral student in this field.

Products were analyzed based on their weight, as opposed to the previously used expenditure-based method. Expenditure-based emission factors estimate how much greenhouse gas a company emits based on the money it spends on products. However, this can be inaccurate because it assumes that all products in a category emit the same amount of greenhouse gases. Additionally, prices can fluctuate due to market conditions, but the weight remains the same. (Jennifer Opel from the University of Bayreuth, more at phys.org)