Driving carbon transparency across supply chains on AWS with CircularTree

As the push for carbon transparency gains momentum, automotive manufacturers must adapt to the changing landscape. Calculating indirect value-chain greenhouse emissions, called Scope 3 emissions, is difficult for automotive manufacturers because of the highly complex nature of their supply chains.

A single car, for example, typically contains thousands of parts from upstream suppliers. Traditionally, automotive manufacturers would manually calculate the carbon footprints of their parts and assembly processes, which was time-consuming and error-prone.

To address these issues, several automotive companies formed Catena-X, an open and collaborative data ecosystem. Designed for the automotive industry, Catena-X provides technical and procedural standards for secure, sovereign data exchange.

With these standards in place, CircularTree saw an opportunity to help its customers enhance the sustainability of their supply chains. “The Catena-X standards are a game changer in the exchange of information along the supply chain,” says Gunther Walden, CEO at CircularTree. “We wanted those standards to be the basis for our solution.”

CircularTree collaborated with BASF, one of the world’s largest chemicals companies and a member of the Catena-X Automotive Network, to codevelop a carbon-data sharing solution. To meet industry regulations and maintain data sovereignty, both companies chose to build the application on AWS.

This decision helps CircularTree enforce end-to-end data governance that empowers its team to build faster while maintaining trust. “Our customers require their data to remain in the EU,” says Anil Akarsu, chief technology officer at CircularTree. “AWS makes that easy for us. We can build all our services on servers in the EU by default, which means that our developers don’t have to worry about spinning up resources elsewhere by mistake.”

Requiring reliability and portability, CircularTree designed the PACIFIC application on a serverless, containerized architecture. By running the application on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service, and AWS Fargate, a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine, PACIFIC automatically scales to demand. “Our main constraint is that we have to be quick with a small number of engineers,” says Akarsu. “We want the simplest solutions without worrying about development overhead. Using Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate empowers us to run our service application without having to think about servers.”

CircularTree hosts the frontend of the application on AWS Amplify, giving its engineers everything they need to build web and mobile apps. For comprehensive identity and access management, the company relies on Amazon Cognito, helping it deliver secure, scalable authentication and access control for users, AI agents, and microservices in minutes. CircularTree has configured Amazon Cognito to enforce tenant isolation across its customers’ accounts, helping keep their data secure. “Out of the box, AWS services are compliant with several regulations,” says Akarsu. “There’s a trust factor with using AWS that gives us and our customers peace of mind.”

Building PACIFIC on a serverless architecture has paid off for CircularTree. The company saves an estimated 80 percent on compute costs by dynamically scaling to demand.

CircularTree and BASF launched PACIFIC in the Cofinity-X App Marketplace. Developed on a standardized data model, PACIFIC helps companies exchange trusted, high-quality PCF data with upstream and downstream suppliers. Further, companies can share their PCF data as readable PDFs or JSON files, supporting regulatory reporting and digital passport integrations.

By bringing PACIFIC to market, CircularTree has simplified PCF calculations, especially for small- and medium-sized manufacturers, helping them reduce the overhead of their lifecycle assessments. As more manufacturers must meet emerging carbon reporting requirements, PACIFIC helps them accelerate their path to compliance.

Within a year of the application launch, CircularTree saw an 80 percent increase in onboarded customers and a 55 percent increase in PCF data requests. “We’ve already gotten requests from companies in other industries that would like to calculate their carbon footprint based on the same approach,” says Walden.