Over the past decade, an increasing number of authors have been examining producer versus consumer responsibility. Recently, a problem has appeared in drafting the standards for the Ecological Footprint: While the method traditionally assumes a full life-cycle perspective with full consumer responsibility, a large number of producers have started to calculate their own footprints. Adding any producer’s footprint to population footprints that all already cover the full upstream supply chain, leads to double-counting: The sum over footprints of producers and consumers is larger than the total national footprint. The committee in charge of the Footprint standardisation process was faced with the decades-old non-additivity problem, posing the dilemma of how to curtail the supply chains of actors in order to avoid double-counting. This report demonstrates a non-arbitrary method of consistently delineating these supply chains, into mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive portions of responsibility to be shared by all actors in an economy.
