Whether with pineapple, dragon fruit or açaí: one smoothie bowl a day keeps the doctor away – we agree. But while you're spooning, do you ever ask yourself what impact you're having on the environment by buying our products? Us too. That's why we want to be transparent and share our life cycle assessments with you. In this article you will learn how we at Wholey calculate the ecological footprint of our smoothies, bowls and shots.
First, a bit of theory: The CO2e footprint indicates the impact our consumption decisions have on greenhouse gases and global warming. In contrast to the Co2 footprint, the CO2e value (CO2 equivalents) takes into account all climate-relevant greenhouse gases that are produced during the life phase of a product (and not just carbon dioxide). An EPD (Environmental Product Declaration) provides environmental information about a product or service with standardized data quality.
With the help of life cycle assessments, companies can identify weak points within their value chain and improve processes. Very important: They are not (!) used to compare products and organizations.
Our mission: to provide enlightenment
LCAs are typically for internal use only and not for marketing purposes. At this point we would like to make another explicit disclaimer: We do not want to advertise or compare ourselves with our numbers. For us, the balance sheet is a tool to improve ourselves. We want to be transparent and do educational work. That's why we disclose our processes and numbers.
This is how we calculate the CO2e footprint
We have calculated the ecological footprint and the CO2 calculation ourselves for each product in accordance with the DIN ISO 140044:2006 standard.
There are databases that can be used to calculate an official EPD. However, the licenses for the databases cost a lot (approx. €10,000 – per year and device). This is disproportionate to what we want to achieve with our ecological balance. In order to still be able to make a reliable statement, we built a safety factor of 0.3 into every calculation, i.e. 30 percent. This means that this life cycle assessment is correct in terms of content and correctly calculated, but is simplified for reasons of costs and benefits and is not a standardized EPD. We obtained the data from the databases of the Federal Environment Agency (probas), the EU's ef_datase 2019 for the PEF, exiobase 3 2018 and usdata 1901009.
We include the following “stages of life” when calculating the product life cycle assessment:
Ingredients: To determine the impact of our ingredients, we looked at how they are produced in the respective countries. We included the influence of sowing, the influence of agriculture during the growth phase, as well as processing and preparation for transport in our calculations.
Transport: We source some of our ingredients from distant countries. Regionality is not one of our strengths. Still. However, we are constantly trying to improve on this point.
In addition to regionality, the seasonality of a product is also crucial for the ecological balance. We harvest and shock-freeze our ingredients to the optimal level of ripeness. Then we send them to the production facilities. We took into account all the transport routes that our ingredients and packaging travel and calculated their impact:
- from the country of origin or field to the supplier warehouse
- from the supplier warehouse to the production facility
- from production to main warehouse
- from the main warehouse to the distribution warehouse
- from packaging production to product production, where ingredients and packaging come together
We cannot create any calculations from our partner's distribution warehouse to the customer because we do not have the data basis for this. In addition, in the best case scenario, this is determined by our partners themselves and is therefore outside our system boundaries.
Production: The production of our products - and thus the fusion of packaging and ingredients - is just as important in our calculations as the production of the packaging itself. The energy consumption of the filling machines is a particular factor in production, while the production of the raw material plays a role in the production of the packaging , but also the production of the packaging itself plays a role. Added to this is the energy required for storage. This is higher for smoothies and smoothie bowls because they have to be stored frozen. The shots, on the other hand, are stored in cold storage and therefore have a slightly lower impact. Our warehouses are located in Germany, so the German electricity mix is used to calculate the impact.
EoL: Lastly, the end of life phase of the packaging is included in the balance of the CO2e footprint. After using our products, the packaging remains. Disposal and reprocessing requires energy and causes emissions, which in turn has an impact on the CO2e footprint of our product. In our calculations we assumed recycling and disposal in Germany.
