Calculate your CO₂ footprint: What data companies from different industries need for their carbon footprint

|  April 24, 2023

🕓 Reading time 7 minutes

Table of contents

1. Composition of the corporate carbon footprint with scope 1, 2 and 3

2. What data is needed for scope 1 and 2 emissions?

3. What data is needed for the 15 scope 3 categories? 

4. Who should be involved in data collection?

5. Tips on dealing with data gaps and implementing the calculation

1. Composition of the corporate carbon footprint with scope 1, 2 and 3

Questions about the environment, climate, and energy in companies ultimately lead to greenhouse gas emissions. Calculating the carbon footprint is therefore an important topic for companies that want to increase their contribution to Climate protection want to contribute. The carbon footprint indicates how much CO2 is emitted by a company's activities each year.

Calculating the corporate carbon footprint: composition

First of all, it is important to understand that a company’s carbon footprint is made up of various sources:

• This includes the company’s direct CO2 emissions
• and indirect CO2 emissions that result from the company's activities but occur at the source, which are owned or controlled by another company. These include, for example, energy use and waste disposal.

Structure according to three scopes

The standards which specify how CO2 data is collected for a company in a comparable manner, divide the areas to be recorded into three scopes:

Scope 1

Scope 1 includes all direct greenhouse gas emissions, such as primary energy sources consumed directly in company properties. Examples include natural gas, heating oil, gasoline, and diesel. In addition, there are emissions from refrigerant leaks and the combustion-engine-powered vehicle fleet.

Scope 2

Scope 2 includes the indirect greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the generation of the purchased energy. CO2 emissions arise from the consumption of secondary energy sources, such as electricity, district heating, steam, or cooling energy in buildings and electric vehicles.

Scope 3

Scope 3 comprises other indirect greenhouse gas emissions that are primarily associated with the company's activities. The Scope 3 emissions are divided into 15 categories and classified into upstream and downstream activities. This ensures a clear and consistent presentation. CO2 emissions in Scope 3 include, for example, the consumption of energy in leased assets (e.g., real estate, vehicles), purchsed goods and services, waste disposal, water and wastewater, business travel, and employee commuting.

You can find a more detailed explanation of the three scopes in the article linked here.

To calculate a company's carbon footprint for a year, a comprehensive analysis must be conducted. This requires collecting data on Scope 1, 2, and 3 activities for the year in question.

2. What data is needed for scope 1 and 2 emissions?

Scope 1 and 2 include direct and indirect energy-related CO2 emissions, including

• Heating,
• Electricity,
• Refrigerant leaks
• and fleet

When collecting data, it makes sense to consider Scope 1 and 2 together and only separate them in the final results. The reason for this is that emissions from both Scope 1 and Scope 2 occur together within these areas. Heat supplied by oil heating, for example, falls within the direct area, i.e., Scope 1. Heat supplied by district heating causes greenhouse gases to be produced elsewhere in the power plant. These indirect emissions therefore fall under Scope 2.

For this reason, it's intuitive for companies to establish a cluster that makes sense for them. This cluster then compiles the amounts of energy generated and consumed by the relevant properties, vehicles, energy systems, and cooling systems.

When calculating CO2 emissions, depending on the data available

• Consumption
• or costs
• or area is used.

These data are then offset against appropriate factors from emissions databases for the relevant year to obtain the CO2 emissions. Special databases exist for emission factors in various sectors, such as energy, and for various countries, such as Germany.

For a high-quality, meaningful calculation of your carbon footprint, you should consult these detailed databases. Companies should contact specialist companies and consultants who can help them calculate their carbon footprint. There are also various tools and CO2 calculators that support companies in calculating their carbon footprint. These provide an initial impression of the data based on average values, but cannot replace a high-quality calculation.

3. What data is needed for the 15 scope 3 categories?

After GHG Protocol is Scope 3 divided into 15 categories:

1.  Purchased goods and services
2. Further processing of sold products
3. Use of sold products
4. Disposal of sold products
5. Upstream transport and distribution
6. Downstream transport and distribution
7.  Capital goods
8. Energy and fuel-related activities
9. Waste disposal
10. Employee commuting
11. Business trips
12. Rented or leased property, plant and equipment
13. Rented or leased property, plant and equipment
14. Franchise
15. Investments

The more detailed meaning of the 15 individual categories can be found in the article linked here.

Materiality analysis: Not all 15 categories need to be reported

These 15 categories must also be complied with under the new ESRS standards for compliance with the CSRD. The significant Scope 3 categories of the carbon footprint must be included in the calculation in accordance with the EFRAG standard ESRS E1 Climate Change.

However, the Climate Change Standard leaves some room for manoeuvre when it comes to the questions of individual Scope 3 Categories. Not every category needs to be reported for every company. Some categories remain optional depending on their relevance to the company's activities.

The first step should therefore be to analyze which Scope 3 categories your company actually needs to cover. Focusing resources on the significant categories is not only required by the reporting standard, but also greatly reduces the effort involved in CO2 accounting in the follow-up phase.

4. Who should be involved in data collection?

In order to calculate emissions as accurately as possible, the long-term goal will be to calculate the significant categories and items using supplier-specific emission factors (e.g., for a product). To this end, suppliers must carry out appropriate assessments and forward them to their customers.

Medium and short term: This is generally only possible for a few items. Everything else must be approximated using quantities or pure cost data, which are offset against average emission factors for a product or service type from a specific geographical area. The more detailed a company can break down its raw data by type and origin, the more detailed the emissions can be calculated.

Therefore, a company first and foremost needs employees from the purchasing and/or accounting departments who are involved in the project and who have information about the costs and quantities of goods and services purchased and sold. This data also includes waste disposal, energy consumption, the purchase of capital goods, the billing of business trips, etc. Most of the raw data required can be taken from the invoices.

5. Tips on dealing with data gaps and implementing the calculation

What to do if there are data gaps?

Many companies face the challenge that direct emissions data from upstream and downstream partners or specific weight and quantity data are often missing. These would provide the best quality for emissions calculations. Since such data is often unavailable, alternative data sources of varying quality must be used. It is therefore crucial to choose a provider such as Green Vision Solutions, which has the flexibility to accept different data qualities and convert them in a meaningful way.

Easily accessible data is often inaccurate, but a corresponding service from the provider makes it possible to obtain emission values from this data as well.

• Statistical methods, such as the extrapolation based on average commuter distributions (e.g. from the Federal Environment Agency) can be used to approximate emissions with efficient use of time.
• Cost information, for example for goods or waste disposal, also provide opportunities to extrapolate quantities using average prices.
• It would be better to use specific information on quantities, distances, and weights, but this is sometimes hard to get.

If no ideal data basis is available or only rough estimates are initially necessary, it should be ensured that the selected service provider accepts these inputs and allows extrapolations based on alternative raw data.

What should you pay attention to when calculating your carbon footprint?

A recognized and audit-proof Corporate Carbon Footprint should

• calculated using high-quality emission factors,
• consider all significant Scope 3 categories
• for optimal resource efficiency, start by working with the raw data already available in your company.

CO2 calculators can't provide this information because they work with average values and blanket categories. To economically access the necessary expertise and specialized emissions databases, it's best to work with a service provider. For the annual corporate carbon footprints, this provider provides data processing software and the necessary consulting and calculation services.

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Your personal project mentor from our family-run company will accompany you from kick-off to handover of results and will be on hand to answer any questions you may have.

Our user-friendly software is ideal for medium-sized companies, allowing you to easily record your raw data in whatever format and depth you require. Whether you need to provide exact supplier data, quantity information, costs, or just auxiliary values for statistical projections, we offer a certified service that makes CO₂ measurement a success for everyone.

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