A Plan of Action to Address Your Carbon Footprint
Author: Alexis Normand
The carbon footprint of a company’s supply chain is notoriously hard to monitor. The carbon from a company’s supply chain, what’s known as Scope 3 emissions, are the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that come from indirect activities like the trucks you use for transport and the electricity usage from your subcontractor’s warehouses. Alarmingly, supply chain emissions make up 90% of a company’s total emissions, according to the EPA. This means that the overall climate impact of a company’s supply chain operations are disproportionate compared to its other business operations. What’s more troubling, however, is that so far there have been very few effective ways to monitor Scope 3 emissions. Attitudes among consumers are changing fast, which means that failure to fully address carbon emissions can have a negative impact on business growth. According to a 2022 IBM survey, 51 percent of consumers revealed that environmental sustainability was more important to them today than it was a year earlier. A large proportion of those consumers were willing to pay extra to support more sustainable businesses, or even change their consumption patterns altogether to support lower carbon emitters. Indeed, companies can no longer delay monitoring their carbon emissions, nor take customer support for granted. Given the sheer scale of Scope 3 emissions, the carbon footprint of your supply chain should be top of mind when you’re addressing your company’s sustainability.