In short
- Packaging customers ask for a product-level declaration, and most carbon accounting software produces a company-level one.
- Material choice dominates the footprint, so your data problem is purchase data by polymer or grade.
- A claim printed on the pack is a regulated claim, which raises the evidence bar on whatever number you produce.
Packaging producers get asked for something most carbon accounting software does not produce. Your customers increasingly request product-level declarations, meaning a figure per pack or per thousand units, while the general platforms in this category build a company-level inventory. Both are legitimate, they answer different questions, and buying the wrong one costs a year. This page separates the two categories, gives you the evidence you can check on each, and says plainly which situations we are not the right supplier for.
We are one of the vendors named here, and our own boundary between what the platform does and what our people do is stated in the section on limits rather than buried.
Why does most carbon software answer the wrong question for packaging?
Because the unit is different. A converter's footprint is dominated by material choice, with converting energy and transport behind it. The data that drives it is purchase data by polymer or grade, press and line energy, and outbound transport. A company inventory built from that data tells you your total tonnes for the year, which is exactly what a bank, a tender or a customer questionnaire wants.
It is not what a brand owner asking for a declaration on a specific SKU wants. They want a number attached to a product, calculated to a product standard, that they can put into their own footprint or their own declaration. Your customers want a product number, not a company number, and no configuration of an organisational tool produces one.
The commercial trap is that the two look similar in a demo. Both show tonnes of CO2 equivalent. Only one of them can be handed to a customer who asked for a declaration.
Which two categories of tool are you actually choosing between?
| What your customer asked for | Unit of the answer | Category of tool | What to demand in the demo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Our supplier questionnaire, annual | Tonnes per company per year | Organisational carbon accounting platform | The completed questionnaire, not a dashboard |
| A carbon number for this SKU | Kg per pack or per thousand units | Product footprinting or LCA | A worked example for one of your own products |
| An environmental product declaration | Product, to a declaration standard | LCA with declaration output | A published declaration they produced |
| A tender submission | Company, in a prescribed format | Organisational platform with that output | The actual output document |
| Evidence behind a recycled content claim | Product and material specific | LCA plus a claims review | The substantiation file, not the headline |
Our internal census of 26 competitor domains, read on 27 August 2026, makes the split visible in the vendors themselves. It classifies four sites under a distinct product-data arena rather than the general carbon-platform category, including two Netherlands-based LCA specialists, and one of the four carries the single largest product-data URL cluster measured anywhere in the census. Those are different companies from the general platforms, which is the clearest signal that this is a different discipline rather than a feature.
How do the general platforms compare on what you can verify?
If your requirement really is the company number, these are the checkable facts. All read on 27 August 2026.
Greenly is rated 4.7 from 27 reviews, the largest content footprint measured in the category, with no published price.
Coolset is rated 4.7 from 18 reviews, mostly mid-market, with unusual regulation depth: 197 of the 725 English pages on their site were regulation content on that date. No published price.
EcoHedge publishes numbers, a free Lite tier and Express Growth at GBP 990 per year, read from their pricing page the same day, and publishes native Xero, QuickBooks and Sage integration.
Hedgehog is rated 4.7 from 9 reviews, publishes a free account with no sales call and Pro from EUR 1,200 per year. Ours is the smallest review sample among the named platforms here.
Eleven competitor pricing pages were queued for this census on 27 August 2026; three returned a site error and were never actually read. Of the eight that loaded, only EcoHedge's carried a number. If you need a budget figure before a procurement conversation, that column does more shortlisting than any feature comparison.
What does the recycled content lever do to your data needs?
Recycled content is the main lever a converter has, which makes it the number your commercial team most wants to talk about, and that is where the evidence bar rises.
Since 27 September 2026 environmental claims made to consumers have been in scope of the EmpCo rules. EmpCo does not create a general substantiate-on-request duty; it prohibits specific practices outright, including a generic environmental claim the trader cannot demonstrate recognised excellent environmental performance for. A recycled content or lower carbon statement printed on the pack falls squarely in that prohibition unless it is tied to the actual product, and a company-level average cannot demonstrate that for one SKU. Our EmpCo claims checklist sets out what to change to comply with the rules.
Practically, this means your material purchase data needs to be resolved to grade, not just to category. Virgin and recycled grades of the same polymer are different lines with different factors, and a tool that collapses them into one purchase category cannot support the claim you want to make. Ask about that specifically. It is a five-minute question that eliminates several products.
Which route fits which converter?
One site, customers asking annual questionnaires. An organisational platform with a free entry point. Get scope 1, 2 and purchased materials in, and stop there until someone asks for more.
Customers asking for declarations on named products. Product footprinting, not a company tool. Start with two or three representative SKUs rather than the whole catalogue, because the method transfers and the data collection does not.
Both, which is most converters over time. Run the company inventory in a platform and treat product work as separate projects. Trying to force one system to do both is how the annual reporting slips.
Selling into construction or building products. The declaration formats there are their own world, and the specialist vendors in that space have far more published output than any general platform. Buy from the specialists.
Making claims on pack. Fix the substantiation before the software. A defensible claim is a document trail, and the calculation is only one part of it.
Where does Hedgehog stop?
The platform does organisational carbon accounting: guided GHG Protocol setup, data collection planning, over 20,000 spend-based and activity-based factors, your own organisation-specific and supplier-specific data, multi-entity management, and reporting outputs covering the GHG Protocol, PPN 006 and the CO2-Prestatieladder. Product footprinting, life cycle assessment, environmental product declarations, MKI and product carbon footprints sit on the consultancy side of our business rather than in the self-serve product, which is LCA and declaration work done by people.
Three limits worth knowing before you shortlist us, each from a customer on our public G2 profile.
Manual data loading. A small business reviewer said in August 2026 that once the data is in it works perfectly, and that getting it in is the challenging part. For a converter with a long materials ledger, that is the honest first-year picture.
Factor traceability is incomplete. A mid-market reviewer wrote in July 2026 that they wanted to see the conversion factor applied between their input file and the platform entry. If your customers audit your numbers, ask us where that stands now.
Not a broad ESG suite. Our lowest public rating is a 3.5 out of 5 from a mid-market customer on G2 in June 2026, who wrote that the platform is less complete if you want broader ESG and CSRD reporting, and named the absence of data source management and decarbonisation target monitoring.
What is the sensible first step?
Read the request you were sent, literally, and identify the unit. If it names a product, a SKU or a declaration standard, you are in the product column and a company platform will not close it. If it names your company and a reporting year, you are in the organisational column and you can start today.
Most converters need the company number first anyway, because it is the input to everything else and it is the faster of the two. You can start a free account on the platform without a call, get help with the inventory through footprint consulting, or book a meeting to work out which column your request actually sits in.
Sources: Hedgehog platform, Hedgehog on G2, Coolset on G2, Greenly on G2, EcoHedge pricing, and an internal census of 26 competitor domains. All read 27 August 2026.
Facts on this page were last verified on 2026-09-17.
