Measurement & boundary

Scope 3

All the greenhouse gas emissions in a company's value chain that it doesn't directly produce or buy energy for — upstream in purchased goods and services, downstream in the use and disposal of what it sells. Fifteen defined categories.

Corewell covered

What it is

Scope 3 is where emissions accounting stops being an internal exercise. Scope 1 is what you burn, Scope 2 is the energy you buy, and Scope 3 is everything else — purchased goods, transport, business travel, the use of your products after they leave you. The GHG Protocol defines fifteen categories, and most companies find that two or three of them dominate the total. Identifying which ones matters more than completeness across all fifteen. The hard part isn't the framework. It's that the underlying data sits with suppliers. Companies typically start with spend-based estimates, which are cheap and defensible as a starting point but produce a number that barely moves when you actually reduce emissions. Replacing estimates with supplier-specific data is the work — and it's slow, because it depends on other organisations choosing to cooperate.

Why it matters

Because the data belongs to other people. For most companies Scope 3 is the large majority of the total footprint, which means the accuracy of your disclosure depends on suppliers who have no obligation to you and often no measurement of their own.

How it connects

Commonly confused with

Scope 2 — Scope 2 covers purchased energy. Scope 3 covers everything else in the value chain.

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