International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education

Assessing greenhouse gas emissions from university purchases

Matthew Thurston Matthew J. Eckelman
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Matthew Thurston Matthew J. Eckelman, (2011),"Assessing greenhouse gas emissions from university
purchases", International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, Vol. 12 Iss 3 pp. 225 - 235
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Greenhouse gas
Assessing greenhouse gas emissions
emissions from university
purchases
225
Matthew Thurston
Recreational Equipment Inc., Kent, Washington, USA, and Received 20 August 2010
Matthew J. Eckelman Revised 9 January 2011
Accepted 20 March 2011
Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering,
Center for Industrial Ecology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
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Abstract
Purpose – A greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory was conducted for Yale University’s procurement of
goods and services over a one-year period. The goal of the inventory was to identify the financial
expenditures resulting in the greatest “indirect” GHG emissions. This project is part of an ongoing
effort to quantify and reduce the university’s environmental impacts.
Design/methodology/approach – The impacts of institutional purchases were analyzed using
publicly available economic input-output life cycle assessment software. This model allows users to
estimate the indirect GHG emissions of procured goods and services using expenditure data for
different categories of purchases. The results are based on national averages for the USA.
Findings – The findings of this inventory indicate that indirect GHG emissions from procured goods
and services are the greatest source of the university’s emissions. A total of 15 of the university’s
142 financial expenditure categories accounted for 80 percent of the GHG emissions. Many of these
categories were expected, including energy purchases, construction activities, and air travel. Others
were more surprising, particularly architectural and engineering services, laboratory supplies, and
software.
Practical implications – This study is expected to assist Yale University in its efforts to reduce
GHG emissions by providing a quantitative basis for prioritizing green supply chain management
decisions.
Originality/value – This study demonstrates that universities and other organizational entities can
proficiently assess indirect GHG emissions from goods and services using publicly available software,
and that these efforts are significant for understanding the environmental impacts of higher education.
Keywords Campus sustainability, Greenhouse gases, Indirect emissions, Life cycle assessment,
Economic input-output analysis, University procurement, Global warming, Supply chain management
Paper type Research paper

1. Introduction
Estimating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions has become a cornerstone of campus
sustainability efforts in the USA, Canada, and many other countries. Members of the
American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment have published nearly
900 GHG inventories since 2006 and hundreds of other universities have published
inventories individually (AASHE, 2010). These efforts are fundamental in crafting and International Journal of Sustainability
tracking climate-related sustainability goals for colleges and universities as they strive in Higher Education
Vol. 12 No. 3, 2011
to be exemplary institutions, as well as testing grounds for innovative climate policies. pp. 225-235
A host of tools and commercial services have been created in order to support campus q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
1467-6370
GHG inventory efforts, the most popular of which is the Campus Carbon Calculator DOI 10.1108/14676371111148018
 IJSHE developed by the US-based organization Clean Air-Cool Planet (CA-CP) in cooperation
12,3 with the University of New Hampshire (Cleaves et al., 2009). Most tools, including the
CA-CP Calculator, make use of the scopes framework developed by the GHG Protocol
Initiative (GHG Protocol, 2010a). Scope 1 emissions (from direct fuel use) and scope 2
emissions (from purchased energy, notably electricity) are relatively easy to calculate,
but the remaining scope 3 emissions (from all other off-site sources) can be quite
226 challenging for campuses to quantify, particularly those institutions that are large and
highly decentralized. Scopes 2 and 3, also known as indirect emissions, transpire as
“a consequence of the activities of the reporting entity, but occur at sources owned or
controlled by another entity” (Daviet, 2006).
Some types of scope 3 emissions are commonly counted on many campuses,
including employee transportation (commuting and air travel), waste and wastewater
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management, and losses from purchased energy transmission and distribution.

The remaining major category of emissions that is generally omitted from campus
inventories is emissions from purchased goods and services. Colleges and universities
are large purchasers, both in terms of the quantities and variety of goods and services
they procure. Each of these items has an associated carbon footprint, or a level of
embodied GHG emissions, associated with its production and supply chain. GHG
emissions associated with a few specific purchasing categories have been commonly
counted, such as various grades of paper, but comprehensive accounting for all
purchases is rare (Lenzen et al., 2010). High impact items, such as laboratory supplies,
furniture, buildings, professional services, and the thousands of other products and
services needed to operate a large institution are rarely included in the current estimates
of GHG emissions. Indirect emissions from purchases account for approximately
85 percent of the higher education sector on average, and thus many campus inventories
do not include a significant, and perhaps dominant, source of GHG emissions
(Huang et al., 2009).
Multiple factors are driving the reporting of indirect emissions, including: interest in
quantifying comprehensive organizational emissions, increased emphasis on GHG
reduction goals, stakeholder requests for emissions information, business-to-business
requests for emissions information, and “awareness and management of climate-related
risks in the value chain” (GHG Protocol, 2010b). This last driver is one of the most
significant organizational motivations for addressing indirect emissions. Identifying
environmental supply chain risks allows organizations, including universities, to engage
their supply base strategically. Suppliers with strong environmental records are better
positioned to respond to changes in environmental regulations or consumer demands.
Developing reliable long-term partnerships with such suppliers can reduce the costs
associated with contract negotiations, legal reviews and audits, and other logistical
changes.
Scope 3 supply chain emissions are particularly challenging to quantify as different
parties oversee various aspects of the supply chain and a downstream purchasing entity
such as a university does not have access to detailed manufacturing information for each
of the products it procures, nor does it have the resources to investigate the supply chain
of each product. Therefore, streamlined methods can help campus sustainability groups
estimate embodied emissions so that the impacts of such GHGs can be measured and
managed.
 1.1 GHG inventories and climate goals at Yale University Greenhouse gas
The Yale Office of Sustainability has estimated the university’s annual GHG emissions emissions
since 2003. Table I shows the 2003-2008 annual average for each source category.
Included in the calculations are Yale’s power plants, electricity use from the regional
grid, the university vehicle fleet, employee commuting, business air travel, and
non-power plant fuel purchases (diesel fuel and natural gas). Between 2003 and 2008,
an average of 62 percent of estimated emissions resulted from the two power plants, 227
both of which are gas-fired cogeneration plants. GHGs emitted by the power plants are
classified as direct emissions. In addition to the power plants, Yale reports direct
emissions resulting from the university’s non-power plant fuel consumption and from
fuel for the vehicle fleet; however, between 2003 and 2008, these two sources accounted
for only 3 and 1 percent, respectively, of all estimated emissions.
Yale University is also reporting certain components of its “indirect” emissions.
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These emissions have been tallied as the source of 35 percent of the university’s
estimated emissions. Of the university GHG emissions measured between 2003 and
2008, electricity use from the regional grid account for 16 percent, business-related air
travel accounts for 14 percent, and employee commuting accounts for 5 percent. But, as
with most educational institutions, GHGs associated with the procurement of all other
goods and services – potentially a large source of emissions – remains largely
unaccounted. Of all procured goods and services, only purchased electricity, vehicle
fuel, diesel fuel, and natural gas are currently assessed for their global warming
potential (GWP).
Yale University procures nearly $1.5 billion of goods and services each year. Tens of
thousands of physical items are purchased, ranging from office supplies to radioisotopes
to rare manuscripts. Additionally, procured services include those of attorneys,
architects, banks, printing presses, dry cleaners, and dozens more. The environmental
impacts associated with these goods and services can be quantified using life cycle
assessment (LCA), a well-developed and internationally standardized framework that
tracks GHG emissions, as well as many other types of impacts (ISO, 2006). For a single
product, environmental impacts can be estimated using “process-based” LCA that
considers the specific manufacturing and transport processes that were used to produce
and deliver the product (EPA, 2010). Universities have regularly used this type of LCA to
compare specific items, such as options for packaging. Such studies require fairly
detailed information for each product under consideration, and so this approach is
impractical for a simultaneous assessment of tens of thousands of items. Process-based
LCAs are also limited in their ability to accurately assess the environmental impacts of
purchased services, again because of data and time requirements ( Junnila, 2006).
In order to estimate the GHGs associated with Yale’s purchase of all goods and
services, including energy carriers such as electricity, we make use of a tool called

Direct emissions Indirect emissions

Scope 1 Scope 2 Scope 3 Table I.
Source Power Non-power University Electricity Air Average estimated GHG
category plants plant fuel fleet use travel Commuting Total emissions for all sources
measured by Yale
MTCO2e 202,000 8,700 2,300 51,400 44,700 16,200 325,000 University, 2003-2008
Total (%) 62 3 1 16 14 5 100 average
 IJSHE economic input-output-LCA (EIO-LCA), which allows the analyst to consider the
12,3 complete supply chain of each item without onerous data requirements. The objective of
this paper is to show how EIO-LCA can be practically applied to large institutions, using
Yale as a case study, and to discuss the relative importance of procurement-based GHG
emissions. The ultimate goal of the project, however, is to inform procurement policy by
identifying the most GHG-intensive products and services flowing through the
228 university. Shifting green procurement efforts to these products and services will assist
Yale in crafting focused procurement policies that produce relatively significant
environmental gains. Overall, these efforts will assist the university in its efforts to
reduce overall GHG emissions and improve its green supply chain management.

2. Methods
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In order to estimate the GHG emissions associated with a wide range of products from all
sectors of the economy, an aggregated approach is required. The EIO-LCA tool used in
this study was developed by the Green Design Institute at Carnegie Mellon University
(Green Design Institute, 2010), based on an EIO methodology (Leontief, 1970). The Green
Design Institute’s model works by using the dollar value of a purchase from a specific
sector in the USA to calculate the impacts created by the entire supply chain for that
purchase. One can consider a variety of impacts, including economic expenditures,
releases of toxic material, energy consumption, employment, water use, emissions
conventional air pollutants, and finally for this study, GHG emissions. Results are
expressed in terms of environmental impact per dollar of output (e.g. the price of a good
or service supplied) (Lave et al., 1995; Hendrickson et al., 2006). Armed, then, with a list of
expenditures (such as university purchases), an analyst can use the EIO-LCA model to
quantify indirect emissions associated with procurement relatively quickly.
There are a number of drawbacks to the model, some of which are particularly
important to mention in the case of procurement. First, this is an aggregated model: the
entire US economy is divided into individual sectors, specifically 428 sectors in the case
of the most recent 2002 input-output tables from the Bureau of Economic Analysis
(Stewart et al., 2007). Given this high level of aggregation, there is no way to differentiate
between items within a single sector other than using differences in price. That is, all
goods and services within a sector are considered identical in terms of GHG emissions
per dollar procured, regardless of their physical makeup or functionality or the location
where they were produced (Hendrickson et al., 2006). Yet, this differentiation is precisely
the goal of eco-labeling schemes that are often employed by university procurement
departments. A second limitation is that the model depends only on price, so that if a
university manages to negotiate a lower price for a given item, this also lowers the
impacts of that purchase in the model, even though the physical good is the same and its
carbon footprint has not changed. Finally, because the EIO-LCA method is
country-specific, imported goods present a challenge. These goods are “assumed to
have the same production characteristics as comparable products made in the country of
interest” (Peters and Hertwich, 2005). This assumption, however, limits the accuracy of
the model in countries with significant imports, such as the USA.
Despite these drawbacks, the EIO-LCA method is a powerful tool that is freely
available to the public and considers all impacts associated with a product’s
manufacturing and delivery to the consumer. For institutions outside of the USA,
EIO-LCA has models for Canada, Germany, and Spain, and similar efforts exist in other
 countries, such as the supply chain factors estimated by Center for Sustainability Greenhouse gas
Accounting for DEFRA in the UK (DEFRA, 2010). emissions
In order to use the EIO-LCA method, university financial expenditure data must be
gathered and classified. Ideally, the expenditure information is organized into categories
that resemble the sectors used by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, as these are also
used in the EIO-LCA tool. This process is by far the most time-consuming aspect of
estimating the GHG emissions associated with procurement, especially so given the 229
decentralized nature of many educational institutions. Purchases can be made by central
administration, individual academic departments, facilities and operations
departments, contractors, and individual staff, faculty and students. Obviously, the
more centralized the bookkeeping, the easier it is to gather and classify expenditure data,
and the finer level of categorization done by university accounting, the easier it each to
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match these categories to the EIO-LCA sectors.

In the case of Yale, a recent push toward centralized purchasing and data collection
meant that all available data on purchases were already highly aggregated. The figures
used in this study were taken from an internal data set detailing all institutional
expenditures in 2009, which contained 286 distinct categories of procured goods and
services. Of the total annual expenditures, 99 percent (by $ value) fell within just 142 of
the 286 categories, and this was used as the cut-off value for the study. (Employee
benefits and financial investments were excluded from this study; only goods and
services were assessed.) Previous to this effort, the classification of purchases made with
individual credit cards had been particularly challenging and we explored using
expenditure classification services offered by the financial institution that issued the
cards. This technique may be useful to institutions that use a single bank. In the event
that all purchases must be manually classified, it is recommended that the GHG analyst
focus on large expenditures of energy-intensive goods and services (such as
construction), as detailed below in the results section.
After gathering the aggregated data, each of the 142 university categories was
matched to a “sector” in the EIO-LCA model. (Henceforth, university spending categories
will be denoted using italicization, while EIO-LCA economic sectors will be identified
with quotations.) Certain categories matched directly with economic sectors.
For example, real estate spending was entered into the model under the “real estate”
sector. Likewise, engineering and architectural services was entered into the EIO-LCA
sector as “architectural and engineering services”. In most cases, however, the pairing
was not direct, but every effort was made to match each of the university categories with
the most appropriate EIO-LCA sectors.
Only five of the expenditure categories presented significant pairing challenges
within the EIO-LCA model, and all of these stemmed from Yale’s categories being more
aggregated than the EIO-LCA sectors. One of these instances was food & beverages
(non-alcoholic). Within the US 2002 EIO-LCA model, there is no single sector for food
and non-alcoholic beverages. Instead, there are 28 distinct food and non-alcoholic
beverage sectors, and so it was necessary to distribute Yale’s expenditures in this
category among these 28 EIO-LCA sectors appropriately. In order to perform this
allocation, we used the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) Consumer Expenditure Survey
(BLS, 2010a) to find average household spending on food and non-alcoholic
beverages for the Northeast region of the USA, where the categories more closely
match the EIO-LCA sectors. Yale’s food & beverage expenditures were then split up in
 IJSHE the same proportion as the average Northeastern household and thus matched
12,3 EIO-LCA food sectors.
The other four pairing challenges were for miscellaneous, other unallowables,
prepaid expenses, and subsidies, each of which represents such a broad range of
procured goods and services that no individual EIO-LCA sector could serve as a pairing.
Therefore, these expenditure categories were not used with the EIO-LCA model. Rather,
230 we used the 2002 national carbon intensity of 507 metric tons of carbon dioxide
equivalents (CO2e) per 2009$1 million as a proxy for the climate impact of general
expenditures (US Energy Information Administration, 2008).
As mentioned above, the latest model year is 2002, so the university’s FY09
expenditures in US2009 dollars were converted into US2002 dollars using the US
Consumer Price Index (BLS, 2010b). The inflation-adjusted expenditures were then
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entered into the model and the results tallied. As noted above, when expenditures for a
single sector are entered, the model estimates the GHG emissions contributed by every
one of the 428 sectors of the US economy. The model characterizes emissions using
IPCC weighting factors for five categories of GHGs: CO2 from fossil fuel combustion,
CO2 from non-fuel combustion processes (such as cement production), methane, nitrous
oxide, and hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6). These
results can be combined into a total GWP measured in CO2e.

3. Results and discussion

The indirect emissions resulting from Yale University’s procurement of goods and
services is approximately 817,000 metric tons CO2e; these emissions occur all over the
world in the supply chains of each product and service. The results of the model indicate
that the greatest sources of emissions are construction and electricity (Table II).
Together, they account for 55 percent of all emissions. Though these categories produce
comparable levels of CO2e, their emission intensities are drastically different.
Construction represents 31 percent of the university’s expenditures, by far the largest
single category of expenditures. Electricity, on the other hand, represents only 2 percent
of all direct expenditures. Emissions from purchased electricity had been previously
considered in scope 2 (Table I), with results that were a fraction of those from the
EIO-LCA model. The discrepancy is due to the fact that the grid subregion that includes
Yale has a significant amount of nuclear power generation, so that the regional
emissions factor is much less than the national average, and so the EIO-LCA results
overestimate emissions from this category. As one might expect, the other major sources
of GHG emissions result from categories with both high expenditures and high
emissions intensities, such as natural gas, state taxes, professional services, and truck
and air transport. As Table II illustrates, the top 15 expenditure categories account for
80 percent of the GWP from Yale’s procured goods and services.
Results can also be aggregated according to the EIO-LCA classification to determine
which of the 428 economic sectors in the USA provide the greatest contribution to the
university’s overall GWP from procured goods and services. The sector “power
generation and supply” – closely related with electricity – is by far the greatest
contributor, accounting for 45 percent of all GHG emissions. Notice that this is far more
than the result of 27 percent presented in Table II. The difference is that here, in addition
to the GHG emissions from producing electricity for direct use at Yale, the emissions
from electricity used in the supply chains of all goods and services are also included.
 Downloaded by New Mexico State University At 19:37 22 January 2015 (PT)

Yale expenditure category Matching EIO-LCA expenditure category GWP (MTCO2e) GWP (%)

Electricity Power generation and supply 223,600 27

Construction Non-residential commercial and health care structures 223,500 27
Natural gas (two categories) Natural gas distribution 73,400 9.0
CT state withholding General state and local government services 22,300 2.7
Outside contractors Non-residential maintenance and repair 19,000 2.3
Food & beverage Mixed 11,900 1.5
Subaward expense Non-residential commercial and health care structures 11,700 1.4
Engineering and arch. services Architectural and engineering services 11,000 1.4
Freight-shipping and transportation Truck transportation 10,900 1.3
Real estate Real estate 10,800 1.3
Air travel (two categories) Air transportation 19,900 2.4
Supplies-laboratory Analytical laboratory instrument manufacturing 8,800 1.1
Supplies-software Software, audio, and video reproduction 7,800 1.0
Note: MT ¼ metric tons
emissions

services
Top 15 Yale expenditure
categories based on total
Greenhouse gas

231

procured goods and

Table II.

estimated GWP from

contribution to the
 IJSHE In order of GWP contribution, “power generation and supply” is followed by
12,3 “nonresidential commercial and health care structures”, “oil and gas extraction”, “iron
and steel mills”, “truck transportation”, and “air transportation” (Table III). Together,
the top 15 sectors account for 84 percent of all emissions.
The total results emphasize the importance of considering indirect impacts in GHG
accounting: the indirect emissions from procured goods and services outweigh
232 the university’s emissions from on-campus fuel consumption by approximately
300 percent. If we exclude the results for purchased electricity and air travel that were
previously accounted for in Table I (and in the case of electricity were overestimated by
the EIO-LCA model), these results still more than double the total GHG emissions
associated with the university (Figure 1).
While these indirect emissions may occur beyond the immediate borders of the
university, they are no less environmentally consequential, and tracking them can help
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to improve the university’s efforts at green supply chain management (Nikbakhsh, 2009).
The university is currently developing a set of sustainable procurement standards, to be
updated annually, and the choice of which goods and services to consider is informed by
these results (Yale Office of Sustainability, 2010). The EIO-LCA results provide GHG
emissions estimates for each expenditure category tracked by Yale, and can be
used to focus on the commodities that release disproportionately high emissions.

EIO-LCA category GWP (MTCO2e) GWP (%)

Power generation and supply 368,000 45

Non-residential commercial and health care structures 86,600 11
Oil and gas extraction 47,700 5.8
Iron and steel mills 26,300 3.2
Truck transportation 25,800 3.1
Air transportation 22,000 2.7
Petroleum refineries 18,500 2.3
Pipeline transportation 18,100 2.2
Cement manufacturing 17,600 2.1
General state and local government services 12,100 1.5
Natural gas distribution 11,900 1.4
Coal mining 11,400 1.4
Non-residential maintenance and repair 9,800 1.2
Table III. Waste management and remediation services 9,300 1.1
Top 15 EIO-LCA sectoral Other basic organic chemical manufacturing 6,000 0.7
contributions to Yale Fertilizer manufacturing 5,700 0.7
University’s total
estimated GWP Note: MT ¼ metric tons
Commuting
Scope 2

Goods and services

Figure 1. Scope 1
(excl. electricity)
Comparison of Yale’s
current measured
emissions with the 0 200,000 400,000 600,000 800,000 1,000,000
EIO-LCA results
GHG emissions (MTCO2e)
 For instance, the results indicate that the university’s procurement of furniture leads to Greenhouse gas
significantly higher GHG emissions, on both an overall and a per dollar basis, than the emissions
initial procurement of vehicles. Information of this nature can focus the university’s
green supply chain management decisions, like further developing its surplus furniture
exchange program to reduce the procurement of new furniture (Yale Traffic Receiving
Stores, 2010). The results can prioritize dozens of other green supply chain management
decisions, some of which may be surprising: athletic equipment over laboratory services, 233
business meals over office supplies, and travel lodging over photocopying.
In addition to helping prioritize green supply chain management efforts, this
inventory will assist the university in the larger goal of comprehensively tracking its
GHG emissions. The development of the present inventory can be used in conjunction
with updated reporting standards (GHG Protocol, 2010b; BSI, 2008) to incorporate
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procured goods and services into the current monitoring system. Furthermore, the
EIO-LCA model can help quantify the environmental benefits associated with
reductions or changes in procurement. Current purchasing reductions are often
reported in terms of cost savings, but not in terms of environmental gains.
Finally, and most importantly, we hope that this GHG inventory will encourage
other institutions to explore their own indirect emissions from procured goods and
services, allowing them to identify climate-sensitive purchasing categories, to share
this information with their communities, and to streamline their GHG reduction efforts.

4. Conclusion
This GHG inventory provided four main lessons. First, colleges and universities can
utilize publically available EIO-LCA software to efficiently estimate indirect emissions
resulting from the procurement of goods and services. This method applies to purchases
from all sectors of the economy. Second, the majority of the indirect emissions resulted
from a small component of the university’s expenditure categories. The most notable
categories include purchased electricity, construction activities, and natural gas
purchases. The third lesson is the identification of unexpected sources of emissions.
These categories range from architectural and engineering services to laboratory
supplies to software. Finally, this inventory demonstrates that indirect emissions –
often an irregular component of campus GHG assessments – can be systematically
measured. This provides a quantitative basis for prioritizing green supply chain
management decisions.

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Further reading
Riddell, W., Bhatia, K., Parisi, M., Foote, J. and Imperatore, J. III (2009), “Assessing carbon 235
dioxide emissions from energy use at a university”, International Journal of Sustainability
in Higher Education, Vol. 10, pp. 266-78.

About the authors

Matthew Thurston is the Product and Supply Chain Sustainability Analyst for Recreational
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Equipment Inc. (REI). He has a Master’s of Environmental Management from the Yale School of
Forestry & Environmental Studies. Prior to working at REI, Matthew Thurston was a
Procurement Analyst at the Yale Office of Sustainability.
Matthew J. Eckelman is a Lecturer at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies
and the Department of Chemical & Environmental Engineering. His research and teaching
covers industrial ecology, green engineering, and LCA. He also works with government and
private sector companies on sustainable resource management issues. Matthew J. Eckelman is
the corresponding author and can be contacted at: matthew.eckelman@yale.edu

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