What is allocation?

When a process generates more than one product, the climate impact from the process needs to be allocated between the products.

Allocation (instead of system expansion) is part of the traditional attributional approach to life cycle assessment. Allocation can be based on physical characteristics of the co-products such as mass or energy content or based on their relative market values (economic allocation).

As a general principle on the CarbonCloud platform, economic allocation is applied. This means that the climate impact from a process is allocated between the products in proportion to their economic value.