Unravel Carbon’s data quality rating (DQR) is an assessment of the credibility of all data used to calculate your company’s carbon emissions. The rating provides a comparative assessment of the quality of emissions factors and emissions factor sources, accounting for several characteristics of each data source.
The DQR evaluates the quality of data sources using two criteria - source type and verification status.
The source type indicates what kind of source the emission factor originally came from. Unravel Carbon extracts emissions factor data from various sources, including websites, research papers, paid databases and governmental reports. These sources vary in credibility and use a range of methodologies, which in turn impacts the quality of the resulting emissions factors.
The verification status indicates the level of quality assurance each data source has undergone. Our data team researches the verification level of each data source, such as if the source has been assured internally or by a third-party verifier, as part of overall due diligence. Our team uses publicly available information to rank the verification status of each source, with unassured or unreviewed as the lowest (1) and externally assured or peer-reviewed as the highest (5).
A number of source types have one standard verification level. For example, Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) is always externally assured since companies must have their EPDs independently assured in order for them to be published. In this case, the DQR score is determined by verification level only and based on our general verification ranking as above. On the other hand, most source types have two or more levels of verification. Our team maps out all possible verification status for a particular source type and determines the DQR based on both the source type and verification level.
| Data Quality Rating | Source type | Verification | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Website | No references provided | An online article on recycled carbon fibre that mentions the fibre’s emission factor without citation |
| 2 | Thesis | NA | A Master’s thesis on life cycle assessment of bio-based plastics |
| 3 | Company Published Report | Partially externally assured | A company’s product carbon footprint summary where a portion of emission calculations had been verified by a third-party |
| 4 | Company Published Report | Independently audited to limited assurance | A company’s Carbon Disclosure Project that was independently audited to limited assurance |
| 5 | Journal | Peer-reviewed | A life cycle assessment of antibacterial gel that was reviewed by at least two experts and published by Springer Nature |