Who’s piloting the approach and what have they learned?
Pilot projects help demonstrate the feasibility and value of the E-ledgers approach. Learn more about who is piloting the approach and how E-ledgers are helping organizations become more energy efficient.
We currently have over 40 organizations exploring E-liability and E-asset pilots in a variety of sectors, including:
– Accommodation
– Agriculture
– Construction
– Financial and Insurance Services
– Healthcare
– IT and Telecommunications
– Manufacturing
– Mining
– Public Administration and Safety
– Transport and Delivery
– Water Services
Any organization can find value from E-liability or E-asset pilots, so long as they are looking for new approaches to energy efficiency. In particular, the following organizations make good pilots of E-liability accounting:
1. Those with significant upstream and direct emissions for a given product or service.
2. Those with a potential competitive advantage in GHG emissions from their own production and/or supply chain.
3. Those facing pressure from customers, investors, and other stakeholders to deliver better value on emissions.
There are many advantages to running an E-liability pilot:
– Improved oversight of emissions at each step of the cradle-to-gate value chain for a given product or service.
– A better understanding of internal emissions down to a granular (product or batch) level informed by activity-based cost accounting principles.
– Managerially useful information for decision-making to drive cost-effective and energy-efficient shifts across the production and supply chain.
– Early adoption of this system positions a company to comply with evolving market demands and regulatory standards, staying ahead of competitors while avoiding potential penalties or trade barriers in the future.
The E-ledgers approach empowers businesses to dynamically differentiate their outputs from those of competitors, based on underlying emissions efficiency, turning clean-production prowess into a competitive advantage.
Are you interested in piloting E-ledgers in your organization?
Explore pilot case studies
A Southeast Asia-based company, Giti Tire, was among the first to pilot the E-liability approach. It calculated the total emissions to produce a standard passenger-car tire, a product that is both crucial to the global economy and, given its high carbon footprint, one where emissions-reduction excellence will be essential to maintaining competitive advantage. As part of its pilot, Giti Tire will now collaborate with its steel suppliers to learn how to source low-emission, high-durability steel cord that reduces resource usage and pollution over a car’s lifetime operations.
Curious about how the E-liability method can support and improve company transparency and decision-making? This article is a deep-dive into two pilot studies – Giti Tire and Heidelberg Materials – that illustrate how the E-liability approach can create a competitive dynamic and drive emissions efficiency in sourcing decisions.
In 2023, we partnered with Hitachi Energy and three tiers of their supply chain to analyze the E-liabilities of electrical transformers. The case study, published in November 2023, describes the counterintuitive insights from the copper supply chain and on cradle-to-gate emissions of Hitachi transformers discovered during the pilot.
Curious about how the Hitachi pilot calculated and analyzed the emissions data according to the E-liability method?
We also partnered with Tata Steel, which is part of India’s largest conglomerate, the Tata Group, to analyze the carbon content of steel produced through various methods. The compelling element of the pilot is that Tata Steel was able to differentiate what is effectively a commodity product on emissions grounds by using product-level emissions accounting.
In 2022, the president of Soprema, an international building materials supplier, committed to reporting the carbon footprint of each product on every customer invoice, to help customers reduce the embedded GHG emissions in the products they purchased. Soprema used the Pilot Playbook to implement the E-liability methodology in a pilot focusing on the company’s bitumen waterproofing systems. Soprema estimates a potential emissions reduction of 34% from the project.
A world leader in serving science, Thermo Fisher Scientific, undertook a pilot to understand the embedded emissions in its 96-well PCR plate, a widely used molecular biology tool for scientific research and molecular diagnostics. It engaged with its Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers to obtain primary data and identify “hot spots” for emissions reduction opportunities which, in turn, will inform its business strategy and investment decisions.
In 2023, we partnered with IDG Security, a security services firm working in high-threat locations, to conduct a pilot project in Afghanistan. They began by identifying the major activities associated with providing that daily service together with “overhead” activities, such as running their headquarters out of Dubai. IDG then gathered data on the emissions generated in their major activities, discovering to their surprise that 38.5% of their total emissions came from feeding their staff. Lastly, IDG allocated the costs to personnel categories, which allowed their customer, the UN, to see clearly what the emissions impact would be for each unit of service in Afghanistan purchased from IDG.
Our most recent case study is with BMW Group, which piloted the E-liability approach on a highly customizable part of its iX range of electric cars — the radiator kidney grille. The pilot addresses a common challenge: working with suppliers who lack the capacity to calculate their embedded emissions. This article explores how BMW Group helped equip suppliers for direct emissions measurement and establish protocols to audit data at the source, ensuring data accuracy from the start.
