January '25 Platform Update: Eco Design Solution Now Complete with Product Modeling

We’re excited to announce the ability to model products from scratch – completing Carbonfact’s Eco Design solution, a powerful combination of features designed to help brands take proactive steps toward decarbonization from the design stage on. By enabling simulations at both the product and company level, teams can model new products and get an accurate view of their emission factors without having to make retroactive calculations.

What's New?

Product Modeling

Product Modeling gives sustainability professionals, designers and sourcers the ability to simulate a product from scratch or experiment with changes in existing products, letting you optimize for emission reductions. With this tool, you can:

• Completely new with this update: Model products from scratch, pre-configuring the most emission-friendly options from the start.
• Simulate the impact of material changes on an existing product. For example, you could switch organic cotton to a blend of recycled + organic cotton.
• Test the effect of production decisions, like altering the origin of materials or suppliers.

This feature embeds Carbonfact into the product design process, creating an opportunity to simulate emission reductions at the earliest stage of development – before a physical prototype is even ordered.

How does it work?

Choose the material (and its origin, if known) from the drop-down menu to replace it. In case you want to add more material - handy for recycled fabrics - click "Add material," select the fabric you want, and specify the percentage composition, like 60% organic cotton and 40% recycled cotton shown in the example above.

Increases or decreases in emissions are also calculated and displayed clearly. In the image above, we switched a 100% organic cotton t-shirt to a blend of recycled and organic cotton, resulting in an emission reduction of 40%.

Company Scenario Modeling

Zooming out from the product level, the Company CO₂ Modeling tool provides the ability to simulate changes across entire product categories or supply chains. This enables brands to:

• Test the effect of scaling sustainable materials across product categories.
• Model the impact of transitioning product processes to renewable electricity.
• Forecast emissions for future material purchases at scale. 

With a bird’s-eye view of company-level changes, sustainability leaders can confidently develop strategies that are concrete to other business leaders. Company-wide reduction initiatives can automatically be populated into your CSRD report, saving you days of calculations. Our favorite part? Single initiatives instantly showcase their impact on your company’s total footprint, providing a clear, one-glance view of their effectiveness.

Why It Matters

Products are designed, not born. Yet so often do we rely on carbon footprint calculations after the fact. By integrating eco-design tools directly into the Carbonfact platform, we’re enabling brands to move from reactive to proactive decarbonization strategies.

Brands can now actively design for lower-carbon outcomes, ensuring sustainability is embedded into their products and processes from the very beginning.