📦 New manufactured products

This sub-item captures the footprint of new product purchases, linked to a person's expenditure and standard of living, via a macro-economic approach. As with the method used for societal services, we use the results of the SDES workto reconstitute the carbon footprint of purchases not captured "elsewhere" in the test for an average French person.

Despite significant limitations (to be discussed shortly), this question is relevant for a number of reasons:

• To broaden the scope of consumption covered by Nos Gestes Climat: here, we take into account expenses that are not captured in the rest of the test, such as decoration, plants, etc. such as decoration, plants, gardening, kitchen equipment, household linen, materials for creative hobbies, DIY. These purchases are often used over the long term and should therefore be amortized according to the type of product, but in this approach we consider that the footprint of purchases is equivalent from year to year and that depreciation is not necessary.
• Enable us to group our purchases of new products into a single question and avoid focusing on "small items" with too many questions: how many vases? How many books? How many bath mats? How many cutlery sets? etc.
• Raising awareness of new product purchases. In Nos Gestes Climat, the footprint of second-hand products is attributed to the original purchaser of the item. Thus, the footprint of a second-hand product is currently considered to be zero (which is clearly stated in the question).

We have therefore considered in this question a breakdown of the following items whose carbon content has been assigned among all economic branches / sub-branches:

• Horticulture (plants, accessories, delivery)
• Glassware, tableware, kitchen utensils
• Leather goods, accessories (lighters, umbrellas, sunglasses, etc.), baby equipment
• Carpets and other coverings, installation and repair
• Home and garden tools
• Repair services for computers and personal and household goods
• Products for routine home maintenance and repairs
• Other manufactured products such as games, toys, sports equipment, musical instruments, jewelry and watches

For example, the "Horticulture" item comprises the "Plant reproduction" sub-branch, representing 2% of the "Agriculture and horticulture products" branch in terms of sales "the "Wholesale of flowers and plants" sub-branch, which accounts for 0.2% of the "Wholesale trade, excluding automobiles and motorcycles per inhabitant" branch, and finally the "Retail trade of flowers, plants, seeds, fertilizers, pets and pet food in specialized stores", representing 1.5% of the "Retail trade, excluding automobiles and motorcycles per capita" branch

However, the footprint captured in this question should be taken with a grain of salt.

Indeed, the macro-economic approach has several limitations, as outlined in our technical guide on societal services, in particular due to the precision of the initial data. The calculation is also based on a single figure, identical for all citizens. Nevertheless, this question proposes a modularization of the footprint via a multi-stake nivy question: Nevertheless, this method of calculation is preferred here to monetary ratios, which have an uncertainty of 80%. The emission factors in the carbon base are not up to date with today's inflation levels, and those averaged for this question are very heterogeneous (we aggregate the factor associated with publishing (books), but also that associated with plastics or metals). To conclude on this subject, and this is undoubtedly the biggest obstacle to the use of monetary ratios, the carbon intensity of a euro spent on a purchase is not at all representative of the product's real footprint. For example, it's not at all obvious that a more expensive book has a bigger footprint. Similarly, a set of linen sheets could very well have a footprint 5 times smaller than a set of cotton sheets lower than a set made from cotton (flax requires very few resources to grow), yet the latter is likely to cost up to 10 times as much.