An electronic product carbon footprint dataset for question answering

The embodied carbon of computing systems constitutes a significant portion of their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. To support environmental initiatives and meet evolving standards, many companies now disclose product carbon footprints in sustainability reports, often with detailed breakdowns. Yet these reports appear in diverse and unstructured formats-text, tables, and graphs embedded in PDFs-creating major challenges for extracting and analyzing component-specific emissions data. This lack of standardization limits comparative assessments and opportunities for targeted reductions. To address this, we introduce a carbon question-answering (QA) dataset designed to enable the extraction and analysis of data from carbon reports of computing products. The dataset features annotated metadata, numerical reasoning tasks, and structured derivations to ensure accurate processing of fragmented information. Because approximately 75% of products in the dataset follow the PAIA (MIT) model for carbon footprinting, the dataset primarily reflects PAIA-style reporting practices, offering insight into how industry methods influence reported values. This work establishes a foundation for training advanced language models to automate aggregation and standardization of emissions data for ICT systems.

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Publication Details

Journal
Scientific Data
Published
2026-01-14
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06544-5
Primary Topic
Green IT and Sustainability
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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An electronic product carbon footprint dataset for question answering

Ajesh Koyatan Chathoth, Bharathan Balaji, Kaiwen Zhao, Stephen Lee
Scientific Data
Green IT and Sustainability
article

An electronic product carbon footprint dataset for question answering

Ajesh Koyatan Chathoth, Bharathan Balaji, Kaiwen Zhao, Stephen Lee
article en

Abstract

The embodied carbon of computing systems constitutes a significant portion of their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. To support environmental initiatives and meet evolving standards, many companies now disclose product carbon footprints in sustainability reports, often with detailed breakdowns. Yet these reports appear in diverse and unstructured formats-text, tables, and graphs embedded in PDFs-creating major challenges for extracting and analyzing component-specific emissions data. This lack of standardization limits comparative assessments and opportunities for targeted reductions. To address this, we introduce a carbon question-answering (QA) dataset designed to enable the extraction and analysis of data from carbon reports of computing products. The dataset features annotated metadata, numerical reasoning tasks, and structured derivations to ensure accurate processing of fragmented information. Because approximately 75% of products in the dataset follow the PAIA (MIT) model for carbon footprinting, the dataset primarily reflects PAIA-style reporting practices, offering insight into how industry methods influence reported values. This work establishes a foundation for training advanced language models to automate aggregation and standardization of emissions data for ICT systems.

Scientific DataVol. 13(1)
Amazon (United States) (US), University of Pittsburgh (US)
National Science Foundation, University of Pittsburgh, Center for Research Computing, University of Pittsburgh
Responsible consumption and production
Openalex Percentile: Top 89%
Green IT and Sustainability
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