Project Spotlight: Avoided Emissions Claim Validation

The Situation

A battery recycler had developed an avoided emissions claim to support its sales conversations. The claim was a powerful selling point, but it had never been independently tested. With customers, investors, and regulators increasingly scrutinizing climate claims, the company needed to know whether the methodology would hold up and what it would take to make a claim it could confidently defend.

The Approach

I began by reviewing the client's existing methodology and calculations against leading frameworks and best practices. The review surfaced several fundamental issues: a lack of robust product-specific data behind the results, a mismatch between what was being compared, and calculation errors that affected the results. Together, these meant the original claim could not be relied on in its current form.

​

Rather than simply flagging the problems, I developed three potential approaches for building a new, robust claim. I then evaluated each against four criteria

​

• Alignment with the client's intended use of the claim

• Cost to develop the claim (i.e. the level of effort required to do the calculation)

• Availability of data to support it

• Alignment with best practices, including relevant ISO standards​

​​

This framework gave the client a transparent view of the tradeoffs between rigor, effort, and commercial usefulness.

Finally, I worked with the client to select a preferred approach and developed guidance on how to present the resulting claim in sales-related discussions, so that the language used with customers matched what the underlying analysis could actually support.

Outcomes and Deliverables

​This project helped the client:

• Understand the specific weaknesses in its existing avoided emissions methodology and the risks of continuing to use it

• Compare three credible paths to a new claim, with the tradeoffs made explicit

• Choose an approach that balanced credibility, cost, and commercial needs

Throughout the project, the client received: 

• A gap assessment of the existing methodology against leading frameworks

• A structured evaluation of three alternative approaches

• A recommended path forward, including data needs and next steps

• Guidance for communicating avoided emissions claims in sales conversations