Carbon border rules ask for emissions at the level of the product you ship. Most manufacturers can only report at the level of the site they run. This article shows how the same connected foundation closes that gap before the deadline does.
From 1st January 2027 the UK prices carbon on imported aluminium, cement, fertiliser, hydrogen and iron and steel, above £50,000 over a rolling 12 months. (HMRC, Autumn Budget 2025)
CBAM changes what carbon reporting has to prove. It is no longer a site-level total in a sustainability report. It is embedded emissions attributed to the specific goods you make and sell, in a form an importer and an auditor will accept. That is a product-level question asked of data that is almost always held at site level.
For a CFO, that is a new liability and a new reporting burden arriving on a fixed date. For a Head of Sustainability, it is the moment carbon stops being an annual disclosure and becomes a number attached to every consignment. Both need the same thing: emissions they can trace to a product, not just to a plant.
Because the figure CBAM asks for does not exist in most manufacturers' systems yet. Energy and emissions are metered at site or building level. CBAM wants them at product and consignment level, split by production route and process step, with an audit trail back to the source data. Bridging the two means joining energy, production and material data and attributing it to the batch and product it belongs to. That is the same connected foundation the energy and OTIF use cases depend on, pointed at carbon.
The same product-level foundation, serving a new question.
Report actual emissions and you can prove a genuinely lower-carbon product where you have one. Fall back on default values, which CBAM allows when actual data is missing, and you risk paying against a conservative benchmark that sits higher than your real footprint. Good data is not only compliance. It can be a lower bill.
The deadline cuts two ways. If you import any of those materials, you carry a CBAM liability from 2027 and need embedded-emissions data from your suppliers to calculate it, or you pay against default values. If you sell into the EU, the pressure is already here: the EU's own CBAM entered its definitive phase in 2026, so your EU customers are asking for verified embedded emissions per product now. Either way the data has to be product-level, attributable and auditable, and building that takes longer than the notice the deadline gives you.
Indirect emissions sit outside the UK scheme until 2029 at the earliest, and the rate is set quarterly, but the reporting obligation and the £50,000 threshold are fixed from January 2027. The time to connect the data is before the first return is due, not after.
The right tools depend on your environment, not a vendor preference. In practice this often means Fivetran or Talend to connect energy, production and material data, Snowflake or Databricks to model it with full lineage using dbt and DataOps.Live, and Qlik to report embedded emissions per product with an audit trail a verifier will accept. We build across the modern data stack and choose what fits the data you already hold.
Product-level energy and product-level carbon are the same data problem asked twice. Connect the foundation once, and CBAM becomes a report you can run rather than a deadline you are chasing.
Product-level energy and product-level carbon are the same data problem. See how connected your operation is before the deadline decides for you.