Embarking on the Scope 3 Journey: How Sourcebynet created a guide for SMEs, in partnership with SGS
Scope 3 emissions, they say, are like a maze – tricky to navigate and full of surprises. That’s why Sourcebynet decided to collaborate with world renowned testing and inspection company, SGS to share insights and experience through a guidebook. The guidebook is tailored for small and medium-sized enterprises who are looking to kick-start their Scope 3 journey.
The guide isn’t a typical dry manual. It gives the audience direct firsthand guidance on all how to tackle Scope 3, leading in with the basics of how to get started. It can be daunting to get started, but the key is to get stuck right in.
How do you get started?
Scope 3 accounting needs a holistic approach as you likely going to face internal resistance when starting out. To help reduce the resistance, Sourcebynet took four simple steps to begin with:
Step one: Get to know yourself
We dug deep into our own operations to understand where our emissions were coming from. We partnered with SGS to help us understand what these were.
Step two: Get the lay of the land
We sifted through the aggregated data to find the hotspots and areas where we could make the biggest impact.
Step three: Partner up!
Suppliers aren’t just vendors; they’re partners on this emissions-reducing quest. We engaged with our supply chain on several different levels. We received emissions data from them with regards to product. As we aim for decarbonising our supply chain, our partners are going to be more important than ever.
Step four: Prioritise and act
We figured out (albeit, we had assumed already) our products were the biggest contributor of our total emissions and focused our efforts there.
Discovery at its finest
The biggest discovery we made was that a handful of products were responsible for over half of our emissions. Armed with this information, we were able to target our efforts using Product Environmental Footprints to understand more about the impact of the products and plan how to reduce. We then spent over eight months to aggregate the data together. This was initially a daunting task, but over the months, it began to run quite smoothly.
In the end, tackling Scope 3 emissions is an ongoing journey. And taking those first steps is often the hardest. But with the guidebook in hand, we’re confident that SMEs such as our suppliers can take that first step with confidence. After all, the journey to a conscious and responsible supply chain starts with one small step.
Please follow the link to access SGS x Sourcebynet: Embarking on the Scope 3 Journey here
