Monetary emission factors to estimate the carbon footprint associated to purchases in research laboratories. Emissions embodied in goods and services can be estimated by measuring physical or monetary flows. Physical estimates are more accurate if emission factors and inventories for each product exist. This is not the case for the sheer amount of goods and services purchased in research laboratories. To make the problem tractable, goods were classified according to the French system for accountability in research (NACRES), to which we manually associated monetary emission factors (EFs) in kg CO2e/euro and for which monetary inventories are readily available through the laboratory accountability. All euro values correspond to year 2019. The emissions of good i can calculated as e(i) = p(i)* EF(i), with p(i) its tax-free price in euro. EFs were estimated using the three approaches sketched in Fig. 1 of the associated publication: i) an environmentally extended input-output (EEIO) method that we will call in the following macro and note the resulting EFs EFmacro; ii) a process-based method that we call micro EFmicro (or LCA for life cycle assessment); and iii) an intermediate approach based on the carbon footprint of selected companies of the research sector, that we call meso. The detailed description of the files is in the tab README for each file and in the accompanying publication.

Python, 3.7

Excel, 2011