The Usage section captures the environmental impact of your product during its use phase — the energy and consumables it needs while in operation. For example, a washing machine uses electricity every time it runs, and a printer uses ink cartridges throughout its life. These impacts are part of your product’s overall footprint.

To calculate these impacts, you need to tell Root three things: the product’s expected lifespan (optional), what energy it uses, and what consumables it consumes.

Usage data is recorded at the product level. For each product, you specify:

These are simple yes/no toggles. Once you turn them on, Root asks for the details.

Like End-of-Life, Usage is an optional feature, and it depends on what your company administrator enabled in the company settings system boundaries. If usage is disabled, the section will show an “out of scope” message and the data won’t be included in impact calculations.

The Usage overview lists every product that needs usage data and lets you complete it for many products at once, rather than opening them one by one. A summary at the top right shows how complete your data is across the selected view, with Total, Complete, and Incomplete counts, and each row shows the product's lifespan, utilities, consumables, and status at a glance. A dash means a toggle hasn't been set yet (which keeps a product incomplete), while "no" is an explicit answer that counts toward completeness.

You can narrow the list by year, include products unrelated to the selected year, or review hidden products. Hidden products are those refered as a proxy to a sourced product, meaning that editing the mother product will allocate proportionally to every child product. The header actions let you Export the current data or manage the consumables available for the use phase, and selecting products with the checkboxes lets you Edit usage in bulk for the whole selection. Note that the bulk edit overwrites all existing usage data for the selected products. To edit a single product, use its Actions menu or open the product and complete its Usage tab.

Navigate to a product and open its Usage tab. You’ll see the current status:

Enter the expected lifespan of the product. This is used to scale the usage impact over the product’s lifetime.

You can add optional notes to explain your lifespan assumption (e.g. “Based on industry average of 10 years”). The lifespan will not influence the result. Its purpose is to support the reasoning.

Toggle Utilities used to yes or no (in Settings).

If yes, enter the electricity amount in kWh that the product consumes over its lifetime. Root will use a global electricity dataset to calculate the impact.

You can add optional notes to explain the electricity figure.

Toggle Consumables used to yes or no (in Settings).

If yes, you’ll need to add each consumable the product uses during its lifetime. For each consumable, provide:

The consumables you reference here will need to be matched to impact datasets in the Consumables matching section. Each consumable needs both a direct impact dataset and an end-of-life dataset to be included in the calculation.

Once all required fields are filled, the product’s usage status changes to “complete” and Root includes the usage impact in the product’s overall footprint.

Electricity impact:

Impact = electricity dataset impact factor × electricity amount (kWh) × number of products sold

Root uses a global low-voltage electricity dataset for this calculation.

Consumable impact:

Impact = (direct impact + end-of-life impact) × consumable amount × number of products sold × conversion factor

Each consumable’s impact includes both its production footprint and its disposal footprint.

The total usage impact for a product is the sum of its electricity impact and all consumable impacts.

If a product is a proxy (a simplified copy of another product), it inherits its usage data from the source product. You cannot edit usage on a proxy — instead, navigate to the source product to make changes.

Product usage emissions are always allocated to Scope 3.11 (use of sold products).

There are no dependencies on facility type or other settings — all usage-phase impact (electricity consumption and consumable use) goes to the same scope category.

This category covers the emissions generated by your products during their use phase at the customer’s site. It includes both the energy the product consumes and the production and disposal of any consumables it requires.

Note that Usage must be enabled in your company settings for these emissions to be included in your footprint. If Usage is disabled, no Scope 3.11 emissions will appear in your GHG report.