Techno Focus

Zeus Packaging Introduces Carbon IQ: A Powerful New Add-on to Help Customers Track and Cut Packaging Emissions

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Zeus Packaging, one of Europe’s leading sustainable packaging providers, has launched Zeus Sustain Carbon IQ, its first customer-facing digital platform designed to help businesses better understand, compare and manage the environmental & economic impact of their packaging choices.

Offered as part of the company’s expanding Zeus Sustain initiative, Carbon IQ allows customers to estimate packaging-related impacts such as carbon footprint, eco-cost and energy demand, and compare material and design alternatives using a simplified life cycle assessment (LCA) approach.

Carbon IQ functions as a carbon mapping software, designed to map emissions across the packaging value chain and offer intelligent insights into potential carbon reduction opportunities through discussion with Zeus’s packaging teams. It includes visibility into Scope 3 emissions, allowing customers to understand the upstream and downstream impact of their packaging decisions critical for meeting corporate carbon reduction targets.

Developed in collaboration with sustainability software experts Nutritics, Carbon IQ draws on leading environmental data sources including IDEMAT and reflects packaging characteristics across key life cycle stages. Product data is refreshed annually to ensure insights remain up to date.

Carbon IQ gives our teams and our customers greater visibility into packaging performance. It supports more informed, measurable choices by bringing environmental data directly into packaging conversations. It has been designed to assist our customers & suppliers in reducing scope 3 emissions.

Declan Breen, Head of Sustainability at Zeus Packaging

Key Features of Carbon IQ:

  • Packaging Impact Estimation
    Input product specifications including materials, manufacturing processes and transport data to generate environmental performance metrics.
  • Product, Basket & Volume Comparisons
    Benchmark packaging alternatives side-by-side to support more sustainable selection decisions.
  • Lifecycle Insight
    Understand indicative performance across key stages of the packaging life cycle. (Where available, end-of-life scenarios are included based on current disposal assumptions.)
  • Simplified Sustainability Grading
    Products are assigned A–E ratings for carbon, eco-cost, and energy demand, using a custom methodology developed in collaboration with Nutritics. (These ratings are intended to support comparison but are not aligned to any industry-wide standard.)
  • Economic Assessment
    Enables users to evaluate not only the environmental performance of packaging options, but also the price impact of alternative materials, formats and supply routes—providing a balanced view of sustainability and cost-efficiency.

Carbon IQ is now live across Zeus’ operations in the UK, Ireland and continental Europe, and is being used internally by procurement and sales teams, as well as externally with customers, to help identify footprint hotspots and support progress toward broader Scope 3 emission reduction goals.

With the ever-increasing impact of Packaging Regulation, particularly the impact of EPR on costs across our industry, it is essential that businesses are able to navigate alternative packaging solutions that mitigate the impact of packaging tax, provide an understanding of how they can cut emissions, but also sensibly evaluate the economics. The strength of Carbon IQ lies in its clarity and ease of use. It helps customers evaluate the impact of different packaging formats using recognised environmental data and expert-driven frameworks.

Keith Ockenden, CEO of Zeus Packaging

Carbon IQ complements Zeus Packaging’s existing sustainability services and marks the next step in its mission to offer customers actionable insights, transparency and measurable progress on packaging impact supporting not only greener decisions, but smarter commercial outcomes.