Scope 3?

List member Rob asked me to clarify what I meant by this line a couple days ago:

“Cleaning up your Scope 3 is an enormous undertaking even as a soloist, so park that for now.”

Here’s the quick explainer again for context: Scope 1 are emissions you create directly; Scope 2 are indirectly created by power companies who you purchase power from; and Scope 3 are the emissions that other orgs in your supply chain create through their own practices. All lumped together, this forms your “footprint”.

Your supply chain includes any person, organisation, resource, activity or technology contributing to you delivering your work. Upstream that might include your internet service provider, your paper supplier, your software subscriptions and so on, and downstream might include your delivery service company, your bookkeeper, and your end customer (yes, your customer is a part of your supply chain < this is an important Scope 3 detail I’ll touch on tomorrow).

Each of those entities will generate their own emissions, which gets lumped on you as part of your Scope 3. One way of looking at it this: if you engage with a big polluter (essentially creating demand for them), you don’t get away with that so easy. But if you support a less harmful alternative, your footprint improves.

The reason it’s such a huge undertaking, is because affecting someone else’s operations to make them cleaner is close to impossible… yet it falls to you to either convince them, or switch to an alternative.

Eg: If I send 20 parcels a day by courier, and my delivery account is with a company who’s fleet all runs fossil fuel (most likely!), I could ask them if they have a plan to transition to EVs in the future. If they say yes, I might stick around and see how that plays out. If they say no, I either wear that emission baggage in my Scope 3, or look for a cleaner alternative.

Then rinse and repeat with every supplier 👈 massive undertaking.

The sooner you jump on it the better, absolutely. But it’s rarely the low-hanging fruit that switching power suppliers might be, which is why I recommend Scope 2 as your kicking off point rather than Scope 3. Get a few easy wins first.

The factors that make you question your suppliers are sometimes found in your end customers as well, who are a component of Scope 3 and as you’ll see tomorrow, a potentially massive one.