Working in close partnership with the International Carbon Black Association (ICBA) and its member companies, including ACC member Cabot Corporation, TrueNorth Collective has delivered what it identifies as the first‑ever life cycle assessment (LCA) and cradle‑to‑gate product carbon footprint (PCF) that can be used across the global carbon black sector.
Carbon black is a critical material used in industries ranging from transportation to infrastructure, but its use in a hard‑to‑abate manufacturing sector made credible, comparable emissions data historically difficult to produce.
TrueNorth Collective, a sustainability consulting firm that helps companies understand and improve their environmental impacts, guided ICBA and its members through a multi‑stakeholder process to establish a unified, ISO‑compliant LCA and PCF for furnace carbon black. Their work required aligning methodologies and navigating differences across ISO standards and the GHG Protocol, while resolving accounting “grey zones” that had persisted for years. The carbon black industry faced several challenges in developing an LCA, including inconsistent approaches to life cycle accounting across companies, unclear treatment of co-products and system boundaries, variable quality of upstream data, and a lack of standardized Product Category Rules (PCRs).
At the same time, customers, regulators, and sustainability commitments increasingly demand robust, ISO‑aligned, and comparable carbon footprint data. Without a unified approach, the industry lacked a trusted reference point for decision making and reporting.
The new LCA and PCF can be used across the industry, serving as a valuable reference for customers, regulators, and downstream value chain partners. TrueNorth Collective’s work represents an achievement for the carbon black sector and a model for how external collaborators can accelerate meaningful progress toward transparent, credible sustainability outcomes.