Since the publication of Article 173 of the French Energy Transition Act, many companies have decided to include their carbon footprint in their CSR reporting. However, by focusing solely on scopes 1 and 2, they run the risk of overlooking a significant proportion of polluting emissions- indirect emissions.
In many sectors, the vast majority of GHGs are produced upstream or downstream of the company's own activities. These indirect emissions, known as scope 3, can represent up to 3 or 4 times more than the GHGs from scopes 1 and 2. The selective inclusion of these "indirect" GHGs by companies also distorts their carbon reporting. For example, 70% of companies (see graph below) report emissions linked to business travel, the weight of which is insignificant! As a result, companies generally present carbon reports that are far removed from the real content of their scope 3.
Nevertheless, some companies are gradually starting to measure the various Scope 3 items. Only around 30% of companies are analyzing the emissions associated with their supply chain: purchasing goods and services, as well as upstream-downstream transport. Yet this part of GHG emissions plays a decisive role in a company's eco-responsible performance.
These Scope 3 emissions declarations are still not very transparent, and the information is poorly controlled. They are generally left to the discretion of the company.
Companies justify this by arguing that it is difficult to measure GHG emissions for all Scope 3 items. It is true, for example, that upstream-downstream freight transport involves a multitude of small companies, with long cascades of subcontractors. In Europe, the average size of road haulage companies is 5 employees, making it very difficult to gather relevant information.
TK'Blue Agency has created a highly capillary ecosystem that connects these hundreds of thousands of companies and takes into account the many under-processed transport operations. It can thus offer precise analyses of the GHG emissions generated by each company's transport operations, and even associate other external nuisances with them: particulates, accidents, noise, congestion, etc. The agency provides unique indicators and services to analyze the operational performance of the transport chain, and feed into all environmental and CSR reporting.