Understanding and managing Scope 3 emissions: Insights from GBC organisations

8th August, 2025

Reducing carbon emissions is a key focus in many discussions about responsible business. Scope three emissions are often overlooked but can make up the bulk of a company’s carbon footprint. To gain an understanding of how businesses are tackling these emissions, we brought together some of our accredited organisations for a roundtable discussion to explore the barriers, solutions, and questions they face. 

Thank you to Dom Cooper, Director at VU Digital, for leading the session and sharing his insights on his organisation’s Scope 3 journey, along with everyone who contributed to the discussion. 

What is scope 3? 

Scope 3 emissions are indirect emissions across your value chain and are often the biggest part of a business’s footprint.  

A value chain refers to the full range of activities needed to create a product or service, from raw materials through to delivery to the end customer (and sometimes beyond, like disposal or reuse). In the context of Scope 3 emissions, it includes: 

  • Upstream activities to manufacture/create products/services 
  • Downstream activities for how your product /service is used 

 To find out more information on what Scope 3 consists of, and more examples in action, visit: https://www.carbonneutral.com/news/scope-1-2-3-emissions-explained 

Why does Scope 3 matter? 

Scope 3 emissions, which make up around 70% of most businesses’ carbon footprint, are indirect emissions across the value chain – from sourcing and travel to product use and disposal. Scope 3 can be the hardest category of emissions for businesses to tackle. A key challenge is gathering reliable data across complex value chains, especially from smaller suppliers who may lack the resources or systems to report emissions. 

 To help with this, we defined three main areas: exploring, measuring and managing Scope 3:

1. Exploration 

For many businesses, the first step is exploration — beginning to understand how emission reduction applies to them.  

 Actions 

Some organisations can find limited understanding, difficulty quantifying indirect emissions and supplier engagement challenging. Here’s how you can overcome this:  

  • Review emissions across physical (travel, office), digital (hosting, design efficiency, internet use) and operational (suppliers, freelancers) areas. 
  • Use your Good Business Charter accreditation to align suppliers around shared values. 
  • Develop onboarding scorecards to assess supplier sustainability practices. 
  • Reflect your values in buying choices: prioritise ethical suppliers. 
  • Create an impact report to establish a baseline and set goals. 
  • Educate suppliers on the benefits of being a responsible business. 

Resources: 

2. Measurement

Once the basics are explored, the next step is measurement. The Greenhouse Gas Protocol identifies 15 categories of Scope 3 emissions, whereas the UK government and NHS reporting often focuses on five more widely applicable ones: 

  1. Business travel 
  2. Employee commuting 
  3. Upstream transportation and distribution 
  4. Waste generated in operations 
  5. Downstream transportation and distribution 

The challenge is avoiding negative displacement of local and independent suppliers in your supply chain who may struggle to meet Scope 3 reporting requirements. 

Actions 

Practical actions you can take include:  

  • Travel: Introduce a travel policy, promote public transport and car sharing, and request emissions data from transport providers. 
  • Waste: Reduce landfill use, repair/recycle/compost and use waste providers that prioritise recycling or biodigesters. 
  • Commuting: Offer work-from-home options and encourage LiftShare schemes. 
  • Logistics: Request emissions data from transport/distribution suppliers and collect energy use data from storage facilities. 

Resources: 

3. Management

Finally, it’s about management: reducing emissions and engaging suppliers in the journey.  

Actions 

Turning compliance into collaboration, ensuring meaningful change can be done by: 

  • Being a knowledge sharer: talk to suppliers about sustainable practices. 
  • Embedding environmental policies and procurement scoring into supplier selection. 
  • Creating supplier forms to gather sustainability information. 
  • Prioritising suppliers with strong sustainability credentials (e.g. FSC, ISO14001, B Corp). 
  • Building values-led supply chains by collaborating across networks. 
  • Support the smaller organisations within your supply chain 

Resources: 

Scope 3 emissions are complex but not insurmountable. By exploring, measuring and managing them, businesses can make meaningful reductions while building stronger, more sustainable relationships across their supply chains.  

You can see examples of GBC-accredited organisations working to reduce their Scope 3 emissions here: https://goodbusinesscharter.com/tag/environmental-responsibility

A huge thank you to the following for their attendance and contributions: 

Adrian Ashton   Adrian Ashton  
Alex Hughes   Auxilium Business Consulting Ltd  
Andrew Durham-Terrett   Roger Oates Design Co Ltd  
Bob Scrase   Fulprint Ltd  
Deborah Warrender   Castlefield  
Dom Cooper   Vu Digital 
Emma Humphrey   Today For Tomorrow  
Emma-Jane Loveridge   Optimum Patient Care Global Limited  
Fran Ellington  Triple Bottom Line Accounting 
Jess Ansell   dbfb  
Nick Howes   LMI UK  
Rachel Jannaway   Jannaway Freelancing  
Riya Jadhav   iDigitalise Ltd.  
Sarah Randall   Buckinghamshire Business First  
Stephen Henry   Positive Planet  
Teresa Ward   Plus4Group Limited