New Brighter Planet tool turns spending data into sustainability insights

MIDDLEBURY, VT, November 19, 2010 (Press-News.org) Brighter Planet has released a new carbon calculation tool that lets businesses efficiently calculate the lifecycle carbon footprint of purchased goods and services. The tool processes existing streams of data from procurement logs, electronic bank statements, and other spending records, analyzing each transaction with advanced environmental economic models to estimate the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions from production, distribution, and retail of all purchased goods and services.

The move comes as major institutions are beginning to focus on measuring and managing lifecycle production emissions of purchased goods and services in their value chains. WalMart, IBM, Proctor and Gamble, and the US Government have all initiated supply chain carbon initiatives in recent months, and the World Resources Institute is poised to issue a major expansion of its seminal GHG Protocol to cover indirect carbon emissions from supply chains.

"Institutions are increasingly looking to get a handle on the full carbon impact of producing the goods and services they buy, but most existing solutions are laborious and expensive," says Brighter Planet CEO Patti Prairie. "By analyzing existing purchasing data with these authoritative carbon models, our new tool is able to offer clients a simple and inexpensive solution to estimating and acting on a significant and heretofore opaque slice of the carbon emissions pie."

As a demonstration of the new tool, Brighter Planet built a mashup that shows some of the model's functionality by bringing it to bear on America's largest consumer -- the US federal government. Brighter Planet aims to bring enhanced carbon insights to businesses, organizations, and governments with the new purchase carbon service. Hosted on Brighter Planet's Carbon Middleware platform, the web-based emissions model is designed to snap easily into diverse systems on the back end, allowing clients to integrate the emissions calculations into existing software rather than adopting a new and separate application.

Links:
Purchase carbon model: http://carbon.brighterplanet.com/purchases/options
Federal government demo: http://fedprint.org/
Brighter Planet's Carbon Middleware: http://brighterplanet.com/tour

ABOUT BRIGHTER PLANET. Brighter Planet's science-as-a-service technology platform brings carbon to life, enabling businesses and software developers to embed real-time carbon intelligence into their systems. The company was recently named Small Business of the Year by TreeHugger for its innovative products and services used by more than 150,000 customers every day.