Hybrid carbon footprint service takes off

@UK PLC's carbon foot printing service now has orders for over 40,000 items requiring footprints. This represents approximately £ 80,000 at the discounted price for early adopters, and is roughly 40x more items than any other repository.  This is as a consequence of a breakthrough that cuts the cost of analysing the carbon footprint of a product from over £10,000 to £4 per product, using hybrid product carbon footprint technology.  The underlying product identification technology was jointly developed with Goldsmiths College and Reading University as part of a major Knowledge Transfer Project, with the environmental data from CenSA (Centre for Sustainable Accounting).

As a result the @UK PLC Green Marketplace will be the largest global repository of carbon footprint information.  There is now a compelling  business case for organisations to carbon footprint and become carbon neutral, since the ROI on running a green campaign and switching to electronic ordering and invoicing requires on average 8 sales to pay back.

Whilst many organisations take sustainability very seriously and have been running large projects to determine their carbon impact, the technologies available to help then have been 'early stage' and expensive.  This has meant in practical terms that organisations have focused on energy consumption and the cost of travel as these were relatively straightforward to calculate.  Products have been much more difficult and the companies that have calculated the carbon footprint of their products have found it to be a slow and expensive process.

At the heart of all of the @UK services lies accurate product identification. including the manufacturer, distributors, pack sizes, attributes and classification. This data mine powers the marketplaces' product aware search, the comparison and benchmarking capabilities in SpendInsight and now the product identification element of carbon footprinting.  It is the combination of this capability with the years of research by SEI (Stockholm Environment Institute) and ISA(Integrated Sustainability Analysis) to create the CenSA  data that has transformed carbon footprint analysis from a specialised consultancy driven process, to a mainstream data analytics service.

The @UK PLC Green Marketplace, launched by Richard Benyon MP, Minister for Natural Environment and Fisheries on 7th October 2010,  now has over nine times as many product footprints as all other carbon repositories in the two months since launch.

The UK has been the international leader in carbon footprinting with BSI and the Carbon Trust putting significant effort into the creation of PAS 2050 the first standard for carbon footprinting, and has successfully pioneered product carbon footprints.

The Carbon Trust has spent the past five years creating a carbon registry of PAS 2050 certified products, and has just over 1,000 products in the registry.   @UK PLC is building upon this ground work to revolutionise the cost and time required for carbon footprinting, so that 1,000's of products can now be quickly and accurately carbon footprinted using @UK PLC's hybrid product carbon footprint technology.

There are a large number of products that are commonly purchased.  @UK PLC has identified over 3.6 million products which are currently available for purchase through the marketplace.

Ronald Duncan, Executive Chairman of @UK PLC commented:

 “Our innovative product development means that it's now it is possible for organisations to measure their green impact in a cost effective manner. By cutting the cost of Product Carbon Footprints to £4 per footprint, suppliers can now provide independent measurement of their impact in a cost effective way.  The Green Marketplace also offers up new opportunities for organisations of all sizes to move to trading electronically with their suppliers, which could easily fund the entire business ecosystem to become carbon neutral.”

Enquiries:
@UK PLC
Ronald Duncan
Chairman
Tel: 0118 963 7000

Beaumont Cornish Limited
Roland Cornish
Tel 0207 628 3396

Threadneedle Communications
Caroline Evans-Jones, Alex White
Tel 020 7653 9850

Notes to Editors

@UK PLC is the UK market leader in Platform as a Service using Platform Generator and provides secure cloud based ecommerce, eprocurement and email services to business and the public sector with over 1 million users.

Platform Generator provides a leading UK electronic marketplace, has formed over 200,000 companies using the SiteGenerator ecommerce engine.  @UK’s SiteGenerator ecommerce, part of the Platform Generator, allows suppliers to trade with all major finance systems, @UK’s marketplace and other leading marketplaces.

@UK has a Buying Solutions framework contract for the provision of its new “Spend Insight™” Spend Analysis services, that allows its services to purchased by any public sector body with out the requirement for a further tendering process.  @UK has analysed over £ 100 billion in spend through SpendInsight™.  SpendInsight provides the data for @UK PLC GreenInsight environmental analysis system and @UK PLC e2class database of 3.6 million classified items with environmental data.

@UK provides professional classification by Coding International a wholly owned subsidiary of @UK to e2class and a certified carbon neutral program.  The carbon footprint data is provided by CenSA under its agreement with @UK.

@UK's Platform Generator software speeds up secure software development and allows @UK to provides a secure internet eMarketplace enabling buyers such as local authorities, schools and hospitals to buy online from commercial suppliers ranging from large corporations to small to medium enterprises (“SMEs”). This allows buying and selling to take place with no paperwork and a reduced chance of errors through transposition, achieving major savings throughout the supply chain.

@UK has a key competitive advantage as an ecommerce based marketplace it ensures that prices are correct from requisition through to payment, where catalogue based marketplaces are unable to support carriage, complex pricing and configurable products.

@UK also offers services to new businesses, including incorporation, company secretarial services and filing annual returns.

@UK is included in the Software and Computer Services Sector (9530).  For further information please view our quick links:-

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