REDUCING EMISSIONS: THE RESULT OF OUR LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT

We wrote a blog back in April outlining a Life Cycle Assessment and why it was important to us to   understand the environmental impact our business and products are having. So if you haven’t read that one yet, go check it out and come back, we’ll wait!

All caught up? Good. Let’s get into what we found out and what it means for Unrooted as a business.

We did an in-depth analysis on our best-selling Mighty Ginger and here’s what we found...

1 60ml bottle of Unrooted Mighty Ginger produces 0.2114 kg of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) in its entire lifecycle (from farming and extracting the raw ingredients to the final of all the packaging).

This is the equivalent to:

• 26 smartphones charged
• .5 miles driven by an average gasoline vehicle
• .009 propane cylinders used to power a BBQ

And how do we compare in the market? Pretty well actually, as we’re the first of our category to do this, we’re already winning! And for products like ours, we came out as the lowest producer of CO2e:

• Apple juice = 0.601 kg CO2e
• Mineral water (in glass bottles) = 1.24 kg CO2e
• Soy milk (in a carton) = 0.943 kg CO2e

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE BRAND & BUSINESS?

Our results show us where in our supply chain our product have the highest % of CO2 emissions and unsurprisingly we found 72% of our total emissions came from our packaging, more specifically our glass bottles. HOWEVER, it’s important to understand that our glass bottle can be infinitely and easily recycled everywhere we distribute to. As you, our incredible community, play one of the biggest roles with our packaging emission metric we wanted to make sure it was as easy as possible to make the right choice, and with plastic that is not always a straightforward answer. (Down with micro plastics!)

With the upstream supply chain, glass waste is bound to happen which increases this CO2 metric, so we try and work with suppliers that value upcycling their waste to create a more circular economy. This means, our glass bottle waste is upcycled to a company that refurbishes the glass to create beautiful surfaces and worktops.

At Unrooted we’re committed to creating a sensational planet, so what’s next?

We’re going to support sustainable solutions where emission areas were high in the LCA. We’ll be pushing for the switch to renewable energy in the factories we use, and we’ll be encouraging you all to recycle our glass bottles. 2022 is also the year Unrooted aims to become carbon neutral, but more on that soon…

A statement from Orbis Advisory on the LCA completion:

Earlier this year, Unrooted commissioned Orbis Advisory Ltd to undertake a cradle-to-grave lifecycle assessment of the Mighty Ginger shot product. Cradle-to-grave was chosen as it includes the end-of-life treatment of the product and therefore provides a fuller representation of the products’ associated emissions. The data collection and lifecycle assessment itself aligned with ISO 14040 principles and procedures, and ISO 14044 requirements and guidelines. OpenLCA was used to create the Lifecycle Assessment and to calculate the carbon footprint. The majority of the data collected where from primary sources, with secondary sources such as articles, academic journals and OpenLCA used to provide assumptions and estimates where primary data was not available. In accordance with ISO 14040, the Lifecycle Assessment excluded less than 1% of the total cradle-to-grave emissions of the Mighty Ginger shot. The footprint for the Mighty Ginger shot is therefore considered to be representative in providing a comprehensive understanding of its overall emissions.