Scope 3 Category Map
Which GHG Protocol Scope 3 categories Carbon Passport supports, and how each is populated.
1. Summary
We report against the GHG Protocol, the international standard for measuring emissions. It splits indirect emissions — Scope 3 — into 15 numbered categories. We cover Categories 1 to 7. Categories 8 to 15 do not apply to most of our customers, so they sit outside what we report, and we say so openly in your report. This is a deliberate decision we review every year, not something the calculation cannot handle.
Every figure we report carries its scope (1, 2 or 3), and every Scope 3 line also carries which category it belongs to. So any number in your report can be traced back to exactly where it sits in the standard.
2. Scope 1 and Scope 2 (for context)
- Scope 1 — emissions from things your company owns or controls directly, such as gas you burn on site or fuel in your own vehicles.
- Scope 2 — emissions from the electricity you buy, measured by where it was used.
This page is about Scope 3. Scopes 1 and 2 are in every report and are not split into categories the way Scope 3 is.
3. Supported Scope 3 categories (1 to 7)
| Category | What it covers | Status | Where the data usually comes from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Category 1 | Goods and services you buy | Included | Supplier invoices and your purchase records |
| Category 2 | Capital goods | Included | Invoices for equipment, machinery and fittings |
| Category 3 | Fuel and energy, beyond Scope 1 and 2 | Included | Your energy bills |
| Category 4 | Transport and distribution you pay for | Included | Freight and courier invoices, by distance or by amount |
| Category 5 | Waste from your operations | Included | Waste handling invoices |
| Category 6 | Business travel | Included | Travel bookings, mileage claims, fuel receipts |
| Category 7 | Employees commuting | Included | A staff survey or an estimate |
All seven are filled the same way: a line of spending comes in, gets sorted into a category (see Spend Mapping Rules), and is then reported under the matching Scope 3 heading.
4. Excluded Scope 3 categories (8 to 15)
These sit outside what we currently report. We state this plainly in your report, so anyone reading it — including an auditor — can see exactly where the line was drawn rather than having to guess.
| Category | What it covers | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Category 8 | Assets you lease from someone else | Not covered |
| Category 9 | Getting your products to customers | Not covered |
| Category 10 | Further processing of what you sell | Not covered |
| Category 11 | Customers using what you sell | Not covered |
| Category 12 | Disposing of what you sell at end of life | Not covered |
| Category 13 | Assets you lease out to others | Not covered |
| Category 14 | Franchises | Not covered |
| Category 15 | Investments | Not covered |
4.1 Requesting a boundary reassessment
Leaving a category out is a decision, not a permanent feature of the platform, and we look at it again every year. If your business changes before then, you do not have to wait for the annual review.
Get in touch if any of these becomes true:
- You start leasing assets, either from someone else or to them.
- You start handling the delivery of your own products to customers.
- What you sell gets processed further, used in a way that burns energy, or needs disposing of — and that matters to your overall footprint.
- You start franchising your business, or you hold investments big enough to matter.
How to ask. Contact support and tell us the category number, what has changed in your business, and roughly how big a share of your activity it represents. The deciding question is whether it matters enough: we bring a category in when leaving it out would give a misleading picture of your footprint — not simply because some of that activity exists.
What happens then. We check whether it really matters for you, work out what data would be needed to calculate it, and agree which reporting period it should start from. We normally bring a new category in at the start of a period rather than partway through, so your year-on-year figures stay comparable. If the boundary does change, the note in your report changes with it, and the old boundary stays on record for periods you have already closed.
5. Disclosure and publish gates
- The category on every Scope 3 line is recorded and appears in your audit trail.
- You can set publishing to require that every Scope 3 line has a category before it will go through. With that setting on, a report cannot be published while any Scope 3 spending is still unsorted.
- The statement of what is in and out — Categories 1 to 7 in, 8 to 15 out, reviewed yearly — is held in our methodology and repeated in every Carbon Passport you publish.
6. A note on the boundary
Covering 1 to 7 reflects how the businesses we work with today actually operate. Some companies do have significant activity further down the chain. You might have a lot of emissions from customers using your product (Category 11), or from investments you hold (Category 15). If that sounds like you, this is a reporting decision rather than a limit of the platform, and we can look at it again as part of getting you set up.