Carbon Emissions

Scope 3 is indirect emissions from other activities

These are the indirect emissions from activities you don’t control directly but you are still responsible for, such as emissions from energy your suppliers use, from transporting products, even the emissions from customers using your products.

For example, supposing you manufacture smoke alarms. Scope 3 emissions are those that enter the atmosphere from the factories that supply parts to your business (plastics and electronics and metals), in transporting the parts to your site and to your customers, and the emissions from customers using the smoke alarms in their houses.

Scope 3 emissions are hard to measure as they are very complex.

Calculating your Scope 3 emissions requires lots of different types of information. For some it is employee commuting surveys, or the distance travelled in transportation, or the spend on what materials, products or services we buy. It can also be waste reports, water reports and in our spend on data centre storage.

Scope 3 emissions are also called ‘Value Chain emissions’, accounting for as much as 90% of total emissions in many global companies, which is why they’re considered as fundamental in tackling climate change.

When we get all the data together, we have what is called our business’s carbon footprint and we express this in tonnes of carbon dioxide, as illustrated below. 

To calculate our Scope 3 emissions, you need data from your electricity bills – like your kilowatt hours. It’s important to also know what supplier your electricity came from.