Scope 1 Direct emissions
According to GHG protocol, emissions from Scope 1 are direct emissions.
Companies need to measure not only the emissions caused by their own operations, but also from the raw materials they source and use of the goods they sell.
Calculating the totality of a company’s impact on emissions requires evaluating three scopes:
Scope 1 refers to direct GHG emissions. This means that they directly come from sources that a company owns or controls, such as; company vehicle emissions.
Scope 2 refers to indirect emissions from purchased sources, such as organization’s consumed electricity or cooling.
Scope 3 refers to indirect emissions. Include all the other indirect emissions within your entire value chain, the upstream supply chain (suppliers), as well as downstream GHG emissions occurring with customers.
If we take a deep dive into the scope 1, these emissions are the easiest to control as an organization and can be divided into four categories:
- Stationary combustion
Emissions that come from the combustion of fossil fuels. The most common fuels that fall under this area are; natural gas, liquified petroleum gas, oil, fuel, propane.
- Mobile Combustion
This category includes greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fuel of all vehicles that are owned or leased by an organization: cars, trucks, or vans that are fueled with petrol or diesel.
- Fugitive Emissions
Those are unintentional releases/leaks of greenhouse gasses, such as refrigerant gases or gasses from air-conditioning units.
- Process Emissions
As the name already makes clear, these are the emissions that are released during industrial processes and on-site manufacturing. For example, the CO2 emissions that are produced during cement manufacturing or the processing or manufacturing of chemicals.
The GHG Protocol requires companies to use two reporting methods to disclose their scope 2 emissions:
The market-based reporting method, when companies calculate the emissions from their local power grid.
The location-based reporting method, when companies specifically look into the contracts they have with their electric utilities.
The GHG Protocol has provided 8 scope 2 quality criteria that all contractual instruments must meet to be a reliable data source for the market-based method.
