Zeus Packaging introduces Carbon IQ

Zeus Packaging, one of Europe’s sustainable packaging providers, has today launched Zeus Sustain Carbon IQ, its first customer-facing digital platform designed to help businesses better understand, compare and manage the environmental and 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,' said Declan Breen, head of sustainability at Zeus Packaging. 'It supports more informed, measurable choices by bringing environmental data directly into packaging conversations. It has been designed to assist our customers and suppliers in reducing Scope 3 emissions.'
 
Key features of Carbon IQ include packaging impact estimation, with input product specifications including materials, manufacturing processes and transport data to generate environmental performance metrics. The platform offers product, basket and volume comparisons, with benchmark packaging alternatives side-by-side to support more sustainable selection decisions. Carbon IQ provides lifecycle insight for understanding indicative performance across key stages of the packaging life cycle. Simplified sustainability grading means products are assigned A–E ratings for carbon, eco-cost and energy demand, using a custom methodology developed in collaboration with Nutritics. Carbon IQ also provides an economic assessment, which 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’s 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,' added Keith Ockenden, CEO of Zeus Packaging. 'It helps customers evaluate the impact of different packaging formats using recognized environmental data and expert-driven frameworks.'