Cradle-to-Gate vs. Cradle-to-Grave: Which System Boundary Does Your PCF Need?

Key points at a glance

• Cradle-to-gate covers all emissions from raw material extraction up to the moment your product leaves the factory.
• Cradle-to-grave additionally includes distribution, use and end of life.
• When an industrial customer or OEM asks for a PCF, they almost always mean a cradle-to-gate PCF. The industry standards Catena-X, TfS and PACT make this system boundary mandatory.
• Cradle-to-grave is mainly worthwhile for products whose use phase dominates the footprint, and for Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs).

Anyone creating a product carbon footprint (PCF) for the first time quickly runs into a basic question: where does the assessment end? At the factory gate, at the customer’s site or only at the recycling yard? The answer determines which data you need, how much effort the calculation takes and whether the result meets your customer’s requirement at all. This article explains the system boundaries, shows the differences and helps you decide.

What is a system boundary?

The system boundary defines which stages of a product’s life cycle are included in the calculation. It is set at the start of every assessment as part of the goal and scope definition, as required by the life cycle assessment standards ISO 14040/14044, on which ISO 14067 for product carbon footprints also builds.

A typical product life cycle consists of these stages:

1. Raw materials and upstream products: extraction, production of materials and purchased parts
2. Transport to the plant: delivery of materials and components
3. Own manufacturing: energy, processes and auxiliary materials in your production
4. Distribution: transport to the customer, storage, retail
5. Use: e.g. energy consumption, maintenance, spare parts
6. End of life: collection, recycling, recovery or disposal

ISO 14067 explicitly allows both: a partial PCF covering only some of these stages and a full PCF over the entire life cycle. What matters is that the chosen system boundary is documented transparently.

Cradle-to-gate: from cradle to factory gate

A cradle-to-gate PCF covers stages 1 to 3: all upstream emissions from raw materials and purchased parts, transport to the plant and your own manufacturing. The assessment ends when the finished product leaves the factory gate. Whether transport to the customer is included differs between standards; if in doubt, clarify this with your customer.

Why industrial customers almost always ask for cradle-to-gate: your customer uses your PCF for their own carbon accounting, usually for Scope 3 category 1 “Purchased goods and services”. What happens to your product after the factory gate – further processing, assembly, use – they account for themselves. A cradle-to-grave value would therefore be partly double-counted on their side.

That is why the major industry standards for exchanging PCFs in the supply chain make cradle-to-gate mandatory: the Catena-X PCF Rulebook (automotive), the TfS PCF Guideline (chemicals) and the PACT Methodology (cross-industry). More on this in our article “Your customer requires a PCF under Catena-X, TfS or PACT”.

Advantages:

• Based mainly on data you already have or can request from suppliers (bill of materials, materials, energy consumption).
• No assumptions about your customers’ behaviour needed, so easier to verify.
• Directly usable for your customers’ Scope 3 accounting.

Limitations: a cradle-to-gate PCF says nothing about the climate impact during use. A more efficient product may cause more emissions in manufacturing but significantly fewer over its lifetime. Partial PCFs are therefore only of limited use for comparisons between products, as the TfS PCF Guideline also points out.

Cradle-to-grave: the entire life cycle

A cradle-to-grave PCF covers all six stages, i.e. additionally distribution, use and end of life. It shows the full climate impact of a product.

When cradle-to-grave makes sense:

• Energy-using products such as machines, motors, pumps or appliances: here the use phase often accounts for the largest share of emissions. Calculating only up to the factory gate misses the biggest lever.
• End products for consumers, where there is no downstream customer accounting for the later stages.
• Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), for example in construction, which divide the life cycle into modules and include use and end of life.
• Product development and ecodesign: assessing design decisions, such as material choice versus energy efficiency, requires the whole life cycle. The EU Ecodesign Regulation reinforces this perspective.

Challenge: for use and end of life you have to work with scenarios – for example on lifetime, operating hours, electricity mix in the country of use or recycling rate. These assumptions strongly influence the result and must be documented in a traceable way.

Other system boundaries: gate-to-gate and cradle-to-cradle

• Gate-to-gate only looks at the processes within your own plant. This is useful for optimising your own production, but not sufficient for customer requests, because the often dominant emissions from materials and purchased parts are missing.
• Cradle-to-cradle describes a circular-economy design concept rather than a separate accounting boundary: at the end of their life, materials are meant to become raw materials for new products again.

Comparison at a glance

• Scope
  • Cradle-to-gate: raw materials, upstream products, transport to the plant, own manufacturing
  • Cradle-to-grave: additionally distribution, use and end of life
• Typical use
  • Cradle-to-gate: PCF requests from industrial customers and OEMs, supply chain standards, Scope 3 accounting
  • Cradle-to-grave: end products, energy-intensive use phase, EPDs, product development
• Data required
  • Cradle-to-gate: bill of materials, materials and weights, energy and process data, supplier data
  • Cradle-to-grave: additionally use and disposal scenarios
• Comparability
  • Cradle-to-gate: good within one standard, limited for product comparisons
  • Cradle-to-grave: more meaningful for product comparisons, but highly dependent on scenarios

Which system boundary does your PCF need?

These questions help you decide:

1. Who requested the PCF, and what for? An industrial customer or OEM for their Scope 3 accounting → cradle-to-gate. A construction tender → often an EPD with an extended life cycle.
2. Is there a requirement? Many customers name a standard (Catena-X, TfS, PACT) or send a template. In that case the system boundary is usually already defined.
3. Where do most of the emissions occur? For energy-using products it is worth also looking at the use phase, even if the customer only asks for cradle-to-gate.
4. Do you want to compare products or make design decisions? Then you need the entire life cycle.

In practice, a step-by-step approach works well: first build a robust cradle-to-gate PCF that meets customer requests, then extend it to use and end of life where needed. The data up to the factory gate is the foundation in both cases.

Telusio’s view

Choosing the system boundary is rarely the real problem – it usually follows from the customer’s request. The bigger hurdle comes before that: a robust cradle-to-gate PCF requires complete bills of materials, materials, weights and emission data for purchased parts. This is exactly the data that is incomplete in many companies: in our PCF Study 2026, the companies surveyed name missing supplier data and insufficient master data quality as the biggest hurdles, and the response rate for supplier data is only around 16%. Why this often starts with the bill of materials is shown in our article “Why 80% of PCFs fail because of the bill of materials”.

If your customer requires a PCF and your product data is not yet ready for it, get in touch. We will show you how to arrive at an auditable product carbon footprint despite incomplete data.