The Quest for Environmental Information - Towards a Mobile Application for GHG Emission Tracking in Meat Production Processes

In the context of increasing greenhouse gas emissions, especially the meat processing industry is under pressure by the society to report their product’s environmental impact, which is ten times higher than for products from vegetable origin. However, meat processing companies struggle with the collection and provision of detailed data, as production processes are complex and variable. Recent research showed that automated sensor systems could provide environment relevant information. Nonetheless, these sensors are not diffused in practice. One solution is the usage of mobile devices in production processes to collect environmental data for product carbon footprints. In this study, we present an action design research project, developing a mobile application for GHG emission data collection, using OCR algorithms for automated sensor read-out tasks. An evaluation showed that practitioners perceive the application to be efficient, thus coping with missing automated sensor systems for GHG emission reporting processes.