Carbon footprint

What is carbon fooprint? 

The carbon footprint is the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions during the full life cycle of a product in the market. It is expressed as the mass equivalent of carbon dioxide emitted per functional unit of the product. 

kgCO2e/ production cycle  

 A functional unit is commonly understood as a quantity of product, which is assessed in terms of the environmental impact.  In the case of our company, we consider a functional unit to be one production cycle, which results in the manufacturing of 2″ graphene wafer, which is approximately 20cm2 of graphene. 

Purpose of the calculation 

Determining the carbon footprint is very important for BeeGraphene, as one of our goals is to minimize the carbon footprint of our production processes. We are committed to ensuring that our processes of graphene production have as little impact on the environment as possible 

Determination of the limitations of the described system 

We measure our company’s carbon footprint from the moment we start the production process, until the finished product is ready to be shipped.  

The packaging used by BeeGraphene is bought from an external company – its carbon footprint is can be assigned to the company that produced it and the delivery company. Similarly, when shipping orders, we use the services of subcontractors, and therefore this carbon footprint can be assigned to the transport company.  

Our manufacturing process is based on process of annealing silicon carbide in ultra-high vacuum under Si flux.  

The carbon footprint for our product is made up of the footprints of the individual pieces of equipment used during production process, which can be grouped into the following categories:  

  • Cooling,  
  • Vacuum pumps,  
  • Sensors,  
  • Sublimation source,  
  • Heating element. 

  Collection of input and calculation of output data 

 Section 3 contains the elements that influence the total value of the carbon footprint of our production process. To calculate its size we need to:  

a)  Measure the electricity consumption during a single production cycle.  

In our case, this will be the total energy consumption, based on the sum of the nominal values of the power of the used power supplies, corrected by the load factor, or the instantaneous power consumption, displayed by the power supply, when available.  

b) Enter the measured value in the table below and carry out the calculation. 

Our production process at the beginning of BeeGraphene’s operation (September 2021) generated power consumption at the following level: 

Over the past 1.5 years we have been able to reduce power consumption to the following values through process optimisation:

The amount of kgCO2e generated during the entire production process was calculated based on the measured power consumption. The following conversion rate was used for the calculation: 

1 kWh = 0.7981 kgCO2e 

The carbon footprint of our production process, resulting in the production of a single 2″ wafer, or 20cm2 of graphene, is equal to  4.1405 kgCO2e. This value is almost 50% lower than in the beginning of our operation.  

Summary 

The carbon footprint of the production cycle at BeeGraphene is currently equal to 4.1405 kgCO2e. We are aware of our environmental impact and are constantly working to reduce it as much as possible, as evidenced by the optimization measures taken to date. 

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