Product Packaging

Welcome to the onboarding manual for our data collection tool, which allows you to collect all necessary data to accurately calculate your company's and product portfolio's environmental and carbon impact.

This article will guide you through how the Product Packaging section works.

The Product Packaging section captures the primary packaging used for your products. You first create the packaging you use — each one identified by a Packaging ID and a name — and then describe what it is made of through its Bill of Materials. Packaging IDs are allocated to products on the product details page, and the impact of the packaging is added to those products' overall footprint.

Packaging is part of a product's life cycle, so its materials contribute to the product's total impact. Capturing each packaging once and reusing it across products keeps your data consistent and avoids re-entering the same composition for every product that shares the same packaging.

The overview is where you create and manage your packaging. It is kept deliberately simple: you can add new packaging by giving it a Packaging ID and a name. Each entry then becomes available to allocate to your products and to build a Bill of Materials for.

The Packaging Bill of Materials lists all your packaging that needs a composition. From here you get an overview of which packaging still needs a BOM and which is complete, and you open an individual packaging to work on it.

Opening a single packaging takes you to its own page, where you build the Bill of Materials for that specific packaging — the materials it is made of, with their quantities and units. This is also the only place where you can add documentation and notes, so use it to record the source of your data and any assumptions behind the composition.

Across all three views — the overview, the Packaging Bill of materials list, and the specific packaging page — you can Upload your data, download the Template to fill in or export from your own systems, and Export what is already in the platform.

The difference is that documentation and notes can only be added on the specific packaging BOM page. The overview and the list view are for creating and managing packaging and uploading data in bulk; the detailed record-keeping happens at the individual packaging level. Here is the comprehensive template to upload BOM. For each Packaging ID, the user can input as much materials as it needs. The supplier information is optional.

What is a Packaging ID and how do I use it?

A Packaging ID identifies a piece of primary packaging. One or more Packaging IDs can be allocated to one or multiple products on the product details page, separated by commas. Once a Packaging ID has been allocated, it appears in the Product Packaging section, where you can add a Bill of Materials for it.

Why create packaging separately from products?

Because the same packaging is often used across many products. Creating it once and allocating it by Packaging ID means you only describe its composition a single time, and any update flows through to every product that uses it.