Scope 3 emissions

Scope 3 is the greenhouse gas a company causes but does not emit itself. Scope 1 is what it burns on its own site, Scope 2 is the electricity it buys, and Scope 3 is everything else in its value chain — the goods it purchases, the freight that moves them, and the use and disposal of what it sells.

For a food retailer, Scope 3 is almost the entire footprint. Farming and freight happen at other companies, so the number a supermarket publishes is mostly a number about its suppliers.

Why this lands on an importer’s desk #

Freight sits in Scope 3 category 4, upstream transport and distribution. When your retailer reports its footprint, your containers are inside it, and the retailer needs an estimate per shipment or per tonne to build that figure.

Which is why the questionnaire arrives. It is rarely asking you to have measured anything directly. It is asking for the inputs that let somebody else calculate: weight, origin, destination, mode of each leg, and ideally the tonne-kilometres behind them.

Note that the same freight is in your Scope 3 too. You did not sail the ship either. Nobody in the chain owns these emissions, and everybody reports them — which is why the same container is counted several times over across different companies’ disclosures, and why that double counting is expected rather than an error.

What good enough looks like #

A modelled estimate from a recognised method beats a precise-looking number with no method behind it. ISO 14083 and the GLEC Framework are what a retailer’s own consultants use, and a figure produced either way will be accepted. What will not be accepted is a distance-only calculation that ignores the mode, or a dry-container emission factor applied to a reefer.

FAQ #

My retailer is asking for Scope 3 data. Am I legally required to give it? #

Usually not. Under the CSRD as amended in 2026, a company in scope may not require sustainability information from a value-chain supplier of 1,000 employees or fewer beyond a limited set aligned to a voluntary standard, and a supplier can decline anything past that. The pressure is commercial rather than legal: a buyer who cannot compel a number will still prefer the supplier who has one.