Hand over what you bought, your energy bills and what you sold. Elefo works out the emissions behind every product you make and shows where each number came from. Then it lays out the cuts that take you to net zero, cheapest first, and removal certificates for the last tenth you can't cut. You decide what to carry out. The more of your suppliers and customers join, the better everyone's numbers get.
Free to use. You pay with your anonymised data. How that works
Carbon behind one loaf, from the field to the shop door. Click a colour to see what it is.
The bakery on this page is fictional and its figures are illustrative. They show how Elefo reports, not what any real loaf emits.
Elefo takes a business from "we don't know our footprint" to net zero, in three chapters. Each one builds on the one before.
Work out the footprint of each product and of the whole business, with every number traceable to its source.
2PlannedA list of projects, each priced in euros and in tonnes of CO₂e, ranked on one chart. You pick what to carry out.
3LaterFor whatever you can't cut yet, carbon certificates that are verified, retired in your name, and reported next to your footprint, never hidden inside it.
Most small companies start from their books. Larger plants often have an engineer or a consultant who models them in detail. Both end up in the same place, so you can start simple and add detail later.
For a bakery, a joinery, a print shop. Upload three files your accountant already has, answer a handful of questions, and get a first estimate. Nobody needs to know what an "emission factor" is.
For a steel works, a cement plant, a factory with meters on its machines. An expert builds the site line by line in a workbench and reviews every row. The detail pays off in precision and in reports a verifier will accept.
We follow Breadline & Salt, a fictional bakery with one shop, two breads and a delivery van that supplies the cafés and grocers around it. Each step has something to click. Use the arrow keys to move between steps.
No forms to fill in. Every business keeps three records because its accountant asks for them, and between them they say what came in, what energy was used and what went out. Twelve months is best. Three is the minimum.
Nothing added yet.
Elefo reads quantities, units and dates. It never lifts account numbers, meter numbers or names off a bill into your data, and your prices never leave your account.
An AI assistant reads each invoice line and proposes what it is: flour, salt, gas, or "not a material" for rent and insurance. You don't check 1,180 lines one by one. You confirm groups.
Nothing the assistant proposes counts until a person accepts it. Every accepted group is remembered, so next month's upload sorts itself.
The books can't say what goes into each thing you sell. So Elefo makes a first guess from what you bought divided by what you sold, and asks you to check it. Every question comes with a suggested answer, and the ones that change the result most come first.
To turn "620 g of flour" into carbon, Elefo needs a figure for how much carbon a kilo of flour carries. It climbs down a ladder and takes the first good one it finds. The higher the rung, the more solid the result.
Elefo calculates a figure for each product and for the business as a whole. Any number can be opened to see exactly where it came from, down to the invoice line. If you can't explain a figure to your customer, it isn't worth much.
Why "estimate"? A result built from bulk-confirmed books and spending averages is useful for knowing where you stand. Elefo won't let you file it as final until those parts are firmed up, and it tells you which parts those are.
Customers, banks, auditors and EU customs all ask for carbon figures, each in their own format. Elefo produces each one from the same calculation, so the numbers always agree with each other.
The company-wide inventory, in the three groups the international standard (the GHG Protocol) uses. Plain words on the left, the standard's own term underneath, because that's what your auditor will look for.
| What you burn yourselfScope 1 · oven gas, the van's diesel | Works today |
| Electricity you buyScope 2, location-based · grid average for your country and year | Works today |
| Electricity you buy, by your contractScope 2, market-based · your supplier's mix, or the country's residual mix | Planned |
| What you buy from othersScope 3, category 1 · flour, salt, bags | Works today |
| Deliveries and waste handled by othersScope 3, categories 4 and 5 | Planned |
Downloadable as a spreadsheet today, or printed and saved as a PDF. Once you make a run final, the report is kept exactly as it was, with a fingerprint anyone can check.
Since 2026, anyone importing 50 tonnes or more a year of steel, cement, aluminium, fertilisers, hydrogen or electricity into the EU pays for the carbon in it: a small share at first, 2.5% in 2026, growing every year until all of it is charged from 2034. Without real figures, the importer must use the EU's default values, which are set high on purpose. With Elefo, a supplier can hand over their actual figure, product by product.
At an illustrative EU carbon trade price of €75 per tonne, that's about €118,000 on one shipment once the charge is fully phased in, and about €3,000 for the same shipment in 2026. The figures come from the worked example in Elefo's design and are illustrative.
A single read-only page you send as a link. Your customer sees the figure, what it covers, how solid it is and whether it's been checked. They don't see your recipes, suppliers or prices.
From the field to the shop door · 2026, first half · mostly published figures · not yet verified
If that customer also uses Elefo, your figure flows straight into their calculation, at the top rung of the ladder from step 4. That's how a supply chain gets real numbers instead of averages.
Averages are only as good as the companies behind them. With your agreement, Elefo adds your anonymised results to a shared pool, and the pool gives everyone sharper figures than the rough defaults they'd get otherwise.
A figure is only released once at least five companies have contributed to it, and only as a range, never as anyone's row. The pool is meant to be held by a non-profit, with an older, broader version published as open data. Sharing like this is also how you pay for Elefo: see what it costs.
Once the footprint is known, Elefo turns it into a list of projects the business could carry out. Each one is priced two ways: what it costs or saves in euros, and how many tonnes of CO₂e it cuts a year. They're laid out on one chart, a marginal abatement cost curve (MACC), with the cheapest cuts on the left. Elefo proposes; you decide what to carry out.
Filled in by Cheapest way to cover every tonne. Change anything here to take over. See the result
A longer horizon makes every big investment look cheaper per tonne. Ten years is the default; slide down to five for a more cautious view. The cost is never spread past a project's own life: a van that lasts 8 years can't be paid off over 20.
Most businesses pay none yet. Power stations in the EU pay for every tonne they burn through the Emissions Trading System; heavy industry pays for the part above its free allowances, a share that grows each year; and from 2028 the fuel for heating and road transport follows, paid on the gas bill and at the pump
Here it is charged on what the bakery burns on site: the ovens' gas, the shop's boiler and the van's diesel (Scope 1). Bought goods carry whatever tax their makers pay, in their price, and electricity carries the power station's, so a project saves the tax only when it burns less. Electricity prices rise with the carbon price too, since a gas power station sets the price in most hours; the calculators leave that out, which flatters projects that use more electricity, above all the electric ovens. Removal certificates don't save the tax: you still pay for every tonne you burn. The EU carbon trade price, what an allowance for one tonne sells for, was about €80 in August 2026 and moves daily.
Elefo proposes these seven. Click Accept on the ones you want in your plan, or click a bar in the chart. Click again to take it out.
Fictional bakery, illustrative euros and tonnes. Euros per tonne spreads the upfront cost evenly over the years chosen above, without interest; a real plan would discount it. A machine that wears out inside the window is bought again, and each year after that bears one year's share of the replacement. New equipment also carries the carbon it took to build: a company inventory counts that in the year it is bought, a product footprint spreads it over the equipment's working life, and Elefo does whichever the report needs. This chart leaves it out.
A library of proven measures that keeps growing: an assistant reads new public sources, and a person checks every addition before anyone is offered it. A Find more for my plant button, which sends the assistant to search the web for measures that fit your processes, and brings each back with the sources its figures came from. It is told what you make and use, never your name, your suppliers or your prices. And projects you add yourself. None of them goes into the plan until a person puts it there, and Elefo, not the assistant, works out what each one cuts.
Solar panels and a green power contract both cut the same electricity. Elefo adds projects one at a time and recalculates the whole business after each, so the plan's total is what you'd really get. Some projects can't go together at all: electric ovens replace the gas ovens the heat recovery sits on, so accepting one takes the other out, and the plan says so.
Upfront investment, the yearly effect on running costs and the payback time sit next to the tonnes: the page a bank, a grant office or your own board will want to see. Beside each project are the grants, cheap loans and tax breaks it may qualify for, from the EU down to your region, your town and your energy supplier, since that's where most of the money for a small business is. A Find funding for my plan button looks for the local and short-lived ones a list will always miss. Each programme links to the funder's own page, with the day it was checked. A grant only counts in your plan once it's awarded. Until then you see a second payback time, if awarded.
Next year's footprint is measured the same way as this year's. Elefo sets the two side by side, project by project, so you see whether each cut arrived.
Some emissions stay even after every sensible project: wheat still needs growing, bread still needs baking. For those, a business can buy carbon certificates. Each one stands for a tonne of CO₂e removed from the air or kept out of it somewhere else, checked by an independent body. Elefo will help you buy them for exactly what's left, and report them honestly.
Filled in by Cheapest way to cover every tonne. Change anything here to take over. See the result
Starts at an optimistic 70%, which takes more than today's list of projects.
Linked to the same tax in chapter 2.
Certificate prices from the voluntary carbon market, August 2026, and they vary widely by kind, project and year: avoidance from under €1 (renewable energy) to about €12 a tonne (forest protection); nature-based removals about €15–35; biochar about €100–200; direct air capture €300 to over €800. Sources: Carbonmark, Sylvera, Senken and CDR.fyi market reports, 2026. The calculators use a durable removal at about €200 a tonne, bought again every year at the same price; real prices are expected to fall, and contracts run for years.
Elefo only offers certificates for what your plan leaves. It won't sell you a way around a project that would have paid for itself.
Reports show the full footprint, then the certificates beside it. A customer or an auditor always sees both numbers. That is also what the law asks: from 27 September 2026 the EU bans calling a product climate neutral or net zero if the claim rests on certificates, even in part.
The project, the kind, the year and its serial number travel with it, the same way every figure in chapter 1 opens to its source.
A certificate used for your footprint is retired in your name, so nobody else can claim the same tonne.
Measure, cut, compensate: this is where the three chapters take the bakery. The figures follow your choices in chapter 3, so move the sliders there and watch this change. The goal is net zero, which the science-based standard defines as about nine tonnes in ten cut and only the last tenth taken back out of the air. Covering more than that with certificates makes a business carbon neutral for now, not net zero.
Linked to the same tax in chapter 2.
Fictional bakery, illustrative figures. Per loaf assumes the footprint shrinks evenly across what the bakery makes.
Most of a product's footprint comes from what its maker buys: in the bakery's loaf, the flour alone is half. No business can get that part right on its own, because the real figure belongs to the supplier. When suppliers and customers are both on Elefo, a supplier can pass its real figure straight to its customers, and averages get replaced by real numbers all the way down the chain. That's why the aim is to bring in as many businesses as possible: each one that joins makes the numbers better for its neighbours.
Fictional chain, illustrative shares.
Send a request for a product's figure. If the supplier is on Elefo, they answer with their calculated figure. If not, the request is an invitation to join, and it costs them nothing.
A figure is shared only with the customers you name. They see the number, what it covers and how solid it is. Your recipes, your suppliers and your prices stay with you.
A customer who gets your real figure uses it in their own calculation, and passes on a better number to their customers in turn. For exporters to the EU, that same figure can go on the invoice line and replace a costly default.
Where a supplier isn't on Elefo, the anonymised pool from step 7 gives an average built from real businesses like them, not a rough guess. It gets sharper with every business that joins.
The software is free and open source, with no paid edition and no locked features. What keeps it going is the data: every business that shares its anonymised results makes the averages better for everyone else, and gets the same in return from them.
No name, supplier, customer or price ever goes in, and a figure is only released once at least five businesses stand behind it. The pool is meant to be held by a non-profit, not owned by a company.
A carbon figure ends up in contracts, customs filings and annual reports. These are the rules Elefo holds itself to.
The assistant reads documents and proposes matches. It never changes a number on its own, and no AI is used in the calculation itself.
One click from any total down to the invoice line, the figure used and where that figure was published.
When Elefo falls back to a default or finds nothing, it says so on that line. A missing figure is flagged, never quietly counted as zero.
Each calculation records exactly which data and rules it used. Run it again in five years and you get the identical result, which is what an auditor needs.
What you pay suppliers never leaves your account: not in shared figures, not in the pool, not in reports to customers.
The software is open source, with no paid edition hiding the important parts. Anyone can check how a number is calculated.
Elefo is being built in the open. This is where each part stands.
| Part | Where it stands | In short |
|---|---|---|
| Model a site in detail | Works today | Sites, processes, products and recipes, from templates for any industry, with ready-made ones for steel works and cement plants |
| Calculate and explain | Works today | A footprint per product, every number traceable to its source |
| Figures for fuel, electricity, food, packaging | Works today | Official fuel defaults, estimated grid figures for each country, EU default values, two public French databases: twenty-four foods a bakery buys, and cardboard, paper, plastics, ink, varnish and sawn wood |
| Company inventory and EU customs pack | Works today | As a page, a data file, an Excel workbook or a PDF; a final one is kept as it was handed out, with its fingerprint |
| Start from your books | Works today | Upload three books (CSV or Excel), sort the lines a group at a time with the AI assistant proposing (measured on a fictional test set: 48 of 48 lines right at the first suggestion, all 48 within three, with Gemini 3.8 Flash), answer a few questions, get an estimate per product. Foods and packaging have figures; many other purchases don't yet, so for most businesses an estimate today leans on the energy |
| Accounts and your team | Works today | Invite a colleague by a link that is mailed to them, as an editor or to read only, in which case they see everything and are offered nothing to change. Reset a forgotten password by mail; while you work you stay signed in |
| Figures for most other purchases | Works today | Published sources first; where none exists, what you paid times the sector's average carbon per euro (a French public average, used as a stand-in), marked as an estimate. More sources, country by country, to come |
| Shareable product page | Planned | A link your customer can open |
| Sharing figures along the supply chain | Planned | Suppliers send real figures to the customers they choose |
| Reduction plan (MACC) | Planned | Projects priced in euros and tonnes, with the funding each may qualify for; you choose what to carry out |
| Carbon certificates | Later | For what can't be cut yet, reported beside the footprint |
| The shared pool | Planned | Anonymised averages, released only across five or more companies |
One unit for all greenhouse gases. Methane traps more heat than CO₂, so a kilo of methane counts as many kilos of CO₂e. It lets you add everything up into one number.
The greenhouse gases released to make something, added up. For a product, usually from raw materials to your gate. For a company, over a year.
The figure that turns a quantity into carbon, like "a kilo of flour carries this much CO₂e". Step 4 is about finding the right one.
The standard way to split a company's footprint: what you burn yourself (1), the electricity you buy (2), and everything else in your supply chain (3).
The EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. Importers of steel, cement, aluminium, fertilisers, hydrogen and electricity pay for the carbon in what they bring in: 2.5% of it in 2026, rising step by step to all of it by 2034. Real figures from the maker usually cost far less than the EU's defaults.
A chart of possible projects: how many tonnes each cuts (width) against what each tonne costs or saves (height), cheapest first. It shows where to start.
Net zero, as the science-based standard (SBTi) defines it: about 90% of the footprint cut, and only the last tenth balanced by permanent removals. Carbon neutral: every tonne still emitted is balanced by certificates, which the ISO standard allows while the cuts are under way, as long as both numbers are shown. From 27 September 2026 the EU bans calling a product climate neutral or net zero if the claim rests on certificates, even in part.
Proof that one tonne of CO₂e was removed from the air or kept out of it by a project somewhere, checked independently. Retiring it uses it up for your own footprint, so nobody else can count it.
An estimate is good for knowing where you stand. A final result is one where every line is backed by records and published figures, and nothing needed to publish it is missing.