Understanding the emissions embodied in a product is one of the trickiest parts of carbon reporting. For a hardware company like Raspberry Pi, the bulk of our environmental impact doesn’t come from the electricity we use in our facilities — it comes from the products themselves. In carbon accounting terms, that falls under Scope 3: the indirect emissions spread across our value chain, from raw material extraction through to manufacturing and transport.

Scope 3 is notoriously difficult to quantify. Unlike the energy bill for a building, there’s no single meter reading that tells you the carbon cost of a circuit board. Instead, you have to build the picture piece by piece — quite literally.

Component weight

The method we use starts with the bill of materials. Every product is broken down into its constituent parts, from the PCB, silicon, and connectors all the way down to the individual capacitors and resistors. Each of these components needs a specified weight, which can be taken from either the datasheet or physical measurements.

Weight matters because it’s the bridge between a physical object and an emissions figure. Once we know how much a component weighs and what it’s made of, we can begin to estimate the carbon associated with producing that quantity of material.

Mapping to ecoinvent

To turn those weights into emissions, we map each material to the ecoinvent database; ecoinvent is one of the most widely used life cycle inventory (LCI) databases in the world, holding detailed environmental data for thousands of materials, processes, and energy flows. A gram of aluminium, a gram of copper, a gram of a particular plastic — each carries its own emissions factor.

By matching every weighed component to the closest available dataset, we can build a bottom-up estimate of the embodied carbon across an entire product. It’s painstaking work, but it grounds the numbers in something tangible, rather than relying on broad industry averages.

Producing a life cycle assessment with our partners

Doing this rigorously requires specialist expertise, which is why we worked with Inhabit, a consultancy focused on product life cycle assessments (LCAs). Together, we produced a full LCA for the products in scope. (Inhabit has since been acquired, but the methodology we developed together lives on.)

An LCA looks beyond just materials to consider the wider life cycle of a device, from manufacturing and distribution to end of life. Notably, we don’t include usage, as this varies considerably depending on what the Raspberry Pi is being used for and how it’s powered.

Why it matters

The result is a transparent, defensible view of where the carbon in our products actually sits. That’s valuable for two reasons. First, it lets us report our Scope 3 figures with genuine confidence. Second, and more importantly, it shows us which components and materials drive the largest share of emissions.

Carbon reporting isn’t just a compliance exercise. When done properly, it’s the first step towards building products that are less harmful to the planet.