What are Scope 3 emissions?
Scope 3 emissions are the indirect emissions that occur across a company's value chain — everything that is neither burned on site nor bought as energy. The GHG Protocol divides them into fifteen categories, eight upstream and seven downstream, covering everything from purchased goods to the eventual disposal of sold products.
The fifteen Scope 3 emissions categories
Upstream: purchased goods and services; capital goods; fuel- and energy-related activities not already in Scope 1 or 2; upstream transportation and distribution; waste generated in operations; business travel; employee commuting; upstream leased assets.
Downstream: downstream transportation and distribution; processing of sold products; use of sold products; end-of-life treatment of sold products; downstream leased assets; franchises; investments.
Almost no company reports all fifteen. The Protocol asks you to screen them, decide which are material to your business, report those, and state plainly which are excluded. A boundary that is declared is defensible. A boundary that is silent looks like something being hidden.
Scope 3 emissions examples
Scope 3 emissions examples are easiest to see by following one product through a factory:
- Purchased goods and services (category 1): the cotton a textile plant buys, the clinker a cement grinder imports, the packaging a bottler orders.
- Upstream transportation (category 4): a supplier's truck delivering raw material to your gate.
- Business travel and employee commuting (categories 6 and 7): flights to a customer, the bus or car a shift takes to work.
- Waste generated in operations (category 5): offcuts, scrap and packaging sent to landfill or recycling.
- Use of sold products (category 11): the electricity a sold appliance uses across its life.
- End-of-life treatment (category 12): what happens to the product when the customer throws it away.
Each of the fifteen has a dedicated explanation with examples in the Scope 3 categories guide.
Why your customer asks for it
Because your emissions are their Scope 3. A large EU company reporting its value chain has to get that data from its suppliers, and it cannot invent it. That is the whole mechanism behind the supplier questionnaire that arrives with a deadline and a scorecard attached — you are being asked to supply one line of someone else's inventory.
Purchased goods and services is usually the largest Scope 3 category for a manufacturer, and it is also the one most often estimated from spend rather than measured, which is why buyers increasingly ask for supplier-specific figures instead of averages.
Where Karbon360 draws the line today
Karbon360 covers business travel and employee commuting — the two categories customers ask for first and the two that can be evidenced from records a company already keeps. That boundary is stated explicitly in every report we produce.
The remaining categories are a roadmap decision. We label roadmap as roadmap rather than implying coverage we do not have, because a verifier who discovers an undeclared gap will start checking everything else too.
Related
Most requests are satisfied by Scope 1 and Scope 2 done properly. See Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions explained for how they fit together.