Welcome to the onboarding manual for our impact dashboards. This manual guides you through navigating the dashboards so you can interpret insights and make data-driven decisions effectively.
This article explains how the customer impact dashboard works. It gives you insight into the part of your total company impact attributed to customers — the use phase of your products (the energy and resources consumed while customers use them) and their end of life (treatment after disposal).
How your impact is shown
Using the Impact selector at the top of the dashboard, you can view the customer impact as the total carbon footprint, the Environmental Cost Indicator (ECI), or any individual EF 3.1 impact category (such as water use). You can switch between them freely — they're all shown through the same set of views, so there's no difference in how you navigate them:
Carbon footprint (total) — expressed in CO2e, determined using the IPCC 2021 methodology and the GWP100 indicator, and aligned with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol.
Environmental Cost Indicator (ECI) — a single € value that aggregates all impact categories. If Planet Earth had a bank account, this would be the amount invoiced.
EF 3.1 impact categories — the full set of Environmental Footprint metrics, each in its own unit (for example, water use in m³ world Eq deprived).
The same metrics apply to every score, so each impact category is explained in full just once. For a thorough explanation of every category and how Root converts your data into these scores, see What is characterisation and how does Root convert data into impact scores?
Use the year selector to set the timeframe. The completeness indicator in the top right shows how much of your data has been properly reported/matched. For instance, unmatched materials carry no impact and are flagged in the table below.
Curious to learn more? Read our blogs on the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and the Environmental Cost Indicator.
Navigating the dashboard
Whichever metric you select, the dashboard shows the same views.
Customer footprint
The total footprint attributed to customers for the selected timeframe, shown in the unit of the metric you're viewing. The % of company total below it shows how much of your whole company impact comes from the customer phase.
Top contributing customer impact
This table ranks the contributors to your customer footprint by impact — for example, the electricity consumed while customers use your products, or the treatment of products at end of life — with the amount and each contributor's share of the total.
Customer impact side-by-side
This table breaks down each contributor, with columns for Name, Type (usage or end of life), Total amount, and the impact in the selected metric. Use the Absolute / Relative (%) toggle to switch between each contributor's impact as an absolute value and its share of your overall customer footprint, and the download button at the top right to export the data.
Customer footprint by scope
The total carbon footprint has one additional breakdown that the other metrics don't: a split across scopes. This view distributes your customer carbon footprint across scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions:
Scope 1 — direct emissions from owned or controlled sources.
Scope 2 — indirect emissions from purchased energy.
Scope 3 — all other indirect emissions in the company's value chain.
The customer phase sits downstream in your value chain, so this impact falls almost entirely under Scope 3.
FAQ
What impact categories does Root calculate?
Root calculates your impact across the full set of EF 3.1 metrics — covering carbon, water and land use, toxicity, pollution, air and atmosphere, and resource depletion — and aggregates them into the Environmental Cost Indicator (ECI). Each category is explained in detail in What is characterisation and how does Root convert data into impact scores?
What is included in customer impact?
Customer impact covers what happens to your products after they leave your company: the use phase (energy and resources consumed while customers use the product) and end of life (the treatment of the product once it is disposed of). The Type column tells you which of the two each contributor belongs to.
What happens after I upload data — is the dashboard immediately usable?
Yes, the dashboard is always up to date. We've removed the "Request Impact" button, so you'll instantly see the most current data based on your uploaded information.