How to: Set the Scope of your Carbon Footprint

What is the carbon footprint?

A carbon footprint measures the GHG emissions from all the activities across an organization or for a specific product or service. On Cozero, we calculate your carbon footprint from the activity data that you enter. When building a log, you first select an emission category.

What are emission categories?

An emission category is an activity of the company (e.g. Travel, Hosting, Heating consumption, Power consumption) for which emissions can be calculated. Emission categories are always associated with a specific emission scope as defined by the GHG protocol.

A log will always be associated to a specific emission category and is based on a data input of an underlying business activity/process that can be provided through different means. After this input is provided, the footprint is directly calculated through our emission calculation algorithms.

Selecting emission categories for your organization

When using Cozero, we recommend that you select the categories that are relevant for your business. Below is general guidance on category applicability.

Scope	Category	This category applies:
Scope 1
	Facility Fuel Use	When your organization has fuel in their owner or controlled facilities.
	Equipement gas leakage	When you have equipment with intentional or unintentional releases (e.g. refrigeration systems).
	Company vehicles	When your organization owns vehicles or other sources of mobile combustion.
Scope 2
	Purchased electricity	As long as you purchase & use electricity, always included.
	Purchased heat, steam & cooling	When your organization purchases any of these, typically through direct line or district energy systems.
Scope 3 - Upstream
	Production goods & materials	When your organization procures materials for use in products.
	Office goods	When your organization purchases any material for use in offices.
	Purchased Services	When your organization purchases any service (e.g. IT, consulting, security).
	Capital Goods	If your organization owns large equipment or infrastructure
	Purchased Logistics	If you pay third-party logistics services to move purchased goods from your tier 1 suppliers to your facilities.
	Operational waste	When you organization disposes of waste
	Operational water management	When your organization uses water (that is subsequently treated)
	Business Travel	If you organization has business-related travels
	Employee Commuting	As long as you have employees they will commute and/or work from home generating emissions
	Assets leased from others	If you lease upstream assets and you use an equity share or financial control approach to estimate your scope 1+2 (note: rare situation).
Scope 3 - Downstream
	Logistics of sold products	If your sold products are stored and transported to customers (not paid by the reporting company).
	Processing of intermediary products	If you sell intermediate products that undergo further processing by any 3rd parties. Fairly uncommon and most applicable to manufacturing companies (e.g., producing plastics resins from raw plastics).
	Use of sold products	If you sell products that consume energy directly or indirectly.
	End-of-life treatment of sold products	If you sell products that are disposed of after their use phase.
	Assets leased to others	If you own and operate any assets that are leased to 3rd parties. Not common: some companies lease a small portion of their owned buildings to other tenants but scope 1 and 2 might be already accounting for it since sub-metering is not prevalent (e.g. REITs).
	Franchises	If you own and operate any franchises. Typical examples include restaurant chains.
	Investments	If you have investments that generate profit (e.g. equity/debt investments, project finance, equity in other companies including start-ups and joint ventures, governance bonds/T-bills). Targets financial institutions as well as companies with any investment activity.