There’s been a low-hanging fruit theme in the last few emails – quick ways for us all to make some measurable progress towards 2030 (when we’re supposed to be at half the emissions we’re at now).
The easier stuff has been switching energy or superannuation suppliers – the kind of thing you can start now, and be done with in a few days.
Once you’ve ticked off the easy stuff, you can start looking at bigger tasks – things that generally fall under Scope 3 emissions.
Quick recap – emissions fall under 3 “scopes”:
Scope 1 is direct emissions from things you own, like company vehicles or facilities. Scope 2 is pretty much the power you purchase, so we covered that in the low-hanging fruit.
Scope 3 is everything else that makes up the entirety of your supply chain, and includes (but isn’t limited to):
Technically there are 15 categories within Scope 3.
Not all categories apply to all organisations, and some orgs will create their own industry-specific category to capture data not covered in the 15. For example, this progress report from Yale University in the US created a “student travel” category for their specific reporting purposes, since that is unique to the education sector.
In the business-to-business sector, a lot of your scope 3 emissions will come from suppliers. It’ll be a case of evaluating them, asking questions about how and where they make (or source) their goods, and if they’re not giving you the answers you’re looking for, consider switching.
The 3 Scopes confused me for a long time (there are so many exceptions and interpretations of the rules) but if you want to try and wrap your head around this for your specific organisation, a quick reminder that I’m looking for 3 organisations – we’re trialling a new workshop format to uncover unique opportunities, specifically for your company and industry. Please fill in the very short form here.
These free workshops will be held during the week commencing May 9th.
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