There is an ever growing demand for specific details about a product’s carbon footprint, e.g. in product datasheets. Manufacturers who can make well-founded statements on this topic have a clear competitive advantage. However, it is not possible to give a reliable ad hoc answer to the question of how sustainable a product really is. Many different factors in the complete process chain have an impact on the product carbon footprint. Besides the material, multiple production conditions need to be taken into account – these range from raw material and product logistics to packaging, energy consumption during production, and mould engineering, and all the way through to the service life of the product.

LAYING THE RIGHT FOUNDATIONS

LKH has now made the knowledge it has accumulated over many years digitally available. This expertise comes from projects involving conventional materials or recycled materials and from conversion projects that have involved replacing conventional materials with recycled ones. “This means we can provide our customers with precise statements about the degree of sustainability per product or per kilogram of processed material for multiple product variants very early on in the product creation process,” explains Thomas Ritter, Director of Engineering at LKH. “What’s more, costs can be predicted quickly and reliably at the same time, too. This gives our customers an early opportunity to lay the right foundations for sustainability – in other words, at the very time when important changes can still be made,” he continues.

SOUND AND RELIABLE DATABASE

A product’s carbon footprint depends first and foremost on the choice of materials. For a number of years now, LKH has been using a software tool to consistently pool the relevant data from all material suppliers. As a result, the company now has a dependable database for reliably and knowledgeably evaluating the performance and costs of recycled plastics, bioplastics and virgin plastics – including with regard to their carbon footprints. Thanks to the LKH in-house energy management system, it is possible to predict energy consumption precisely for all products – and the same applies to comparisons of various mould types, too. LKH runs its production operations exclusively on green electricity, so the conditions are particularly good for generating a small carbon footprint.

INDEPENDENTLY TESTED

In 2023, LKH asked the renowned plastics institute Kunststoff-Institut Lüdenscheid to put its evaluation tool to the test. The institute concluded that the database and working method produce realistic results that are borne out in practice. With this database, plastics expert LKH therefore offers its customers useful support during a very early project planning phase for new plastic products. This enables customers to weigh up costs and sustainability for different product variants and ultimately make the decision that offers the greatest possible benefit.