Scope 3 Categories Explained: All 15, With Data, Methods and Examples

What are the 15 scope 3 categories and what does the Scope 3 Standard require?

The 15 scope 3 categories are the GHG Protocol’s framework for sorting the indirect emissions in your value chain that are not already in scope 2: eight upstream, linked to what you buy, and seven downstream, linked to what you sell. The standard that defines them requires you to review all of them and to justify every exclusion.

That standard is the “Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Accounting and Reporting Standard”, published by the GHG Protocol in 2011 with a list of corrections in May 2013. It is supported by the “Technical Guidance for Calculating Scope 3 Emissions” (version 1.0, 2013), which sets out calculation methods category by category. This guide is based on both documents, read on ghgprotocol.org on 11 November 2026.

Under section 6.2, companies shall account for all scope 3 emissions, follow the minimum boundary of each category in Table 5.4, report emissions by category, and disclose and justify any exclusion. The gases to include are set by the February 2013 amendment “Required Greenhouse Gases in Inventories”: all gases required by the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol when the inventory is compiled, nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) included. Biogenic CO2 is reported separately, outside the scopes; removals never go into scope 3.

Two ideas shape everything else:

• the minimum boundary: for categories 1 to 3, all cradle-to-gate emissions of what you buy; for the others, the scope 1 and scope 2 emissions of the relevant partner (carrier, waste contractor, employee, lessor, customer), with the manufacture of their vehicles or buildings left optional;
• the time boundary: everything is tied to the reporting year. For use and end of life of sold products, you report emissions that will happen later because of the products sold this year.

The list of the 15 categories, with one example each, is on our page on GHG inventories to ISO 14064. This guide goes further: relevance criteria, data, calculation methods and the classification traps that auditors pick up.

Status on 11 November 2026. The 2011 Scope 3 Standard still applies. Its revision is part of the consolidated corporate standard being prepared by the GHG Protocol and ISO (“Corporate Standard Version 3.0” in the development plan of 29 July 2026): public consultation estimated for Q2 2027, publication estimated for Q4 2028. Nothing is published, so do not anticipate the future text.

How do you decide which scope 3 categories are relevant?

Map your value chain, make a rough estimate of every category, then apply the written criteria of Table 6.1 of the standard. A category with no activity is reported as “not applicable” or zero; a category that exists but is left out needs a written justification.

The map lists purchases, sales, suppliers and partners at a fixed date, such as 31 December. The screening step (section 7.1) then puts a rough figure on each activity, using industry averages, input-output models or proxies, and ranks them from largest to smallest.

Three rules in the standard prevent common mistakes:

• be wary of spend: ranking by spend is allowed, but money and emissions do not always move together. One example in the standard keeps the purchases that make up 80% of spend, plus any remaining item above 1% of the total;
• exclude in writing: Box 6.1 shows a company that leaves out non-production purchases, for lack of data and because they are small, and publishes that justification. A heavy category cannot be excluded;
• no pick-and-choose downstream: a maker of intermediate products whose end use is unknown may exclude categories 9 to 12, but only together, never a subset (section 6.4).

ISO 14064-1:2018 (“Greenhouse gases — Part 1: Specification with guidance at the organization level for quantification and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions and removals”) does the same screening through significance criteria for indirect emissions: see our ISO 14064-1 requirements guide.

Categories 1 to 8: what data and which calculation methods upstream?

Upstream, the minimum boundary covers the cradle-to-gate emissions of your purchases (categories 1 to 3) or the scope 1 and 2 emissions of your service providers (categories 4 to 8). For each category, the 2013 technical guidance offers several methods, from supplier-specific data down to spend-based estimates.

Categories 1 and 2: where is the line, and when do you count?

The standard tells companies to classify a purchase as a capital good (category 2) or a purchased good (category 1) according to their own financial accounting procedures, without double counting: the fixed-asset register sets the line. The cradle-to-gate emissions of a capital good are counted in full in the year of acquisition, with no depreciation (Box 5.4). An automotive supplier in Kenitra that installs a new line will see its category 2 jump that year and should explain why in its report.

Transport between your tier 2 and tier 1 suppliers is already inside category 1, and materials with recycled content carry their recycling emissions there too (Box 5.6). The guidance’s four methods, from most to least specific:

1. supplier-specific: product-level cradle-to-gate data from each supplier;
2. hybrid: the supplier’s allocated scope 1 and 2 emissions, its activity data, and secondary data to fill the gaps;
3. average-data: mass purchased multiplied by an industry-average emission factor;
4. spend-based: money spent multiplied by a monetary factor from an environmentally-extended input-output (EEIO) model.

The guidance notes that EEIO models cannot tell apart products of different value within one sector and are often built for a single region. For a Moroccan plant that imports its materials, that is a geographical representativeness weakness to record.

Category 3: four activities, never the combustion itself

Category 3 covers what happens before combustion, which is already in your scopes 1 and 2: extraction, refining and transport of the fuels you burn; the same for the fuels burned by the power plants that generate your electricity; electricity lost in transmission and distribution; and electricity bought for resale, which concerns energy suppliers only (Table 5.5). Activity data come from your energy invoices; you need life-cycle factors that exclude combustion and, for T&D losses, a grid-specific rate or a national average. This guide deliberately gives no emission factor values.

Categories 4 and 9: whoever pays decides

Table 5.7 of the standard puts into category 4 the transport of your purchases from tier 1 suppliers and any transport service you buy, including deliveries to your customers; category 9 only takes the transport and distribution of sold products that you do not pay for, including retail and storage. Your own vehicles stay in scope 1 or 2, transport upstream of your tier 1 suppliers is already in category 1, and transport of your fuels is in category 3.

For a Moroccan exporter, the Incoterm in the sales contract settles it. On a CIF or DAP sale you pay the main carriage to Europe: category 4. On an EXW or FOB sale, transport paid by the customer after the delivery point goes in category 9; pre-carriage to the port of Casablanca or Tanger Med, if you pay for it, stays in category 4.

The guidance offers three methods: fuel-based (the carrier’s fuel), distance-based (tonne-kilometres by mode) and spend-based. ISO 14083:2023 (formerly IWA 16:2015; “Greenhouse gases — Quantification and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions arising from transport chain operations”) frames these calculations; our ISO 14083 guide covers leg-by-leg allocation and the data to ask carriers for.

Categories 5 to 8: waste, people and premises

• Category 5. Solid waste and wastewater treated by third parties, including the future emissions of the year’s waste, such as landfill methane. For recycling, count collection and preparation of the materials, not the recycling process itself, and never deduct “avoided” emissions. The waste-type-specific method multiplies the mass of each stream by the share sent to each treatment route and that route’s factor.
• Category 6. Flights, trains, rental cars or employees’ own cars used for business trips; company-owned vehicles stay in scope 1.
• Category 7. In many Moroccan industrial zones, staff travel on chartered buses: the contractor’s agreement gives kilometres and fuel. Otherwise, the average-data method multiplies headcount, the share using each mode, the one-way distance doubled, days worked and a factor per mode. If the company owns the buses, it is scope 1.
• Category 8. A warehouse leased in a free zone belongs here if its energy use is not already in your scopes 1 and 2, depending on the type of lease and your consolidation approach; an asset leased for part of the year counts pro rata.

Categories 9 to 15: how do you handle downstream, especially for intermediate products?

Downstream depends first on what you sell: a final product or an intermediate one. A supplier of parts, fabric or semi-finished goods counts processing by its customer, then the use and end of life of its own part, never those of the final product (Table 5.11 of the standard).

Category 10: intermediate products

Yarn, fabric, steel sheet, plastic pellets or a wiring harness will be processed or built into something else before use. The guidance offers a site-specific method, using energy data reported by the processing customer, or an average-data method based on process averages, which it recommends when customers cannot provide data.

Category 11: where a Moroccan exporter can get a surprise

The minimum boundary covers direct use-phase emissions of three product families (Table 5.8): products that directly consume energy (motors, pumps, electrical equipment); fuels and feedstocks; and greenhouse gases and products that contain or form them during use, among which the standard lists refrigerants, refrigeration and air-conditioning equipment, fire extinguishers and fertilisers. A fertiliser exporter, a gas distributor or a maker of refrigeration equipment therefore has a mandatory, often heavy, category 11.

Indirect use-phase emissions (food that is cooked or refrigerated, clothing that is washed) are optional but should be counted when significant, which matters for Moroccan agri-food and textile exporters. Emissions are reported over the whole expected lifetime of the products sold in the year, with intensity metrics; for a component, you count the component’s own use, through allocation. Any emissions “avoided” by your products are reported separately, never deducted.

Category 12: exported products and packaging

End of life is calculated like category 5, on the mass of products and packaging sold, with the share of each treatment route in the country where the product is thrown away; the guidance points to European statistics as a resource. For a canner in Agadir exporting to the EU, European treatment routes are the ones that count. EU packaging requirements are covered on our PPWR packaging page.

Categories 13 to 15

Category 13 applies to a manufacturer that leases a shed or a machine to a third party; category 14 to a franchisor, such as a Moroccan retail brand building a franchise network (manufacturers usually report it as not applicable). Category 15 is designed mainly for financial institutions, but also applies to any company with holdings outside its consolidation boundary, such as a joint venture it does not control; emissions are allocated by share of investment. Banks need these figures for their own category 15, which is why they ask borrowers for carbon data: see climate risk and IFRS S2.

Primary or secondary data: how do you choose and prove quality?

Use primary data from suppliers and partners for the categories that weigh most and those you plan to reduce; use secondary data, such as industry averages or monetary factors, for screening and minor items. The standard requires you to report, for each category, the share of emissions calculated with data from suppliers or other value chain partners.

Primary data come from specific activities in your value chain: a supplier’s figures, a site’s energy use, the distance actually travelled. Secondary data are published averages, government statistics, financial data or proxies (Table 7.3). Secondary data cost less, but they do not show reductions achieved by a given supplier: to track a target, you need primary data.

Quality is judged on five indicators (Table 7.6); Box 7.2 suggests a scoring scale, whose “very good” level is shown below:

The standard accepts higher uncertainty for scope 3 than for scopes 1 and 2, provided it is described and good enough for your goals. Ask your main suppliers for a product carbon footprint to ISO 14067:2018 (see product carbon footprint to ISO 14067), use the same IPCC 100-year global warming potentials across all three scopes, and for Morocco-specific factors start from the national inventory submitted to the UNFCCC, citing the source and year of every factor.

How should scope 3 be presented in your report and to customers?

Report each category’s emissions, data sources, methods and justified exclusions, exactly as chapter 11 of the standard requires. Customers and verifiers then read the same figures, built the same way.

Section 11.1 makes the following mandatory: a scope 1 and 2 report in line with the Corporate Standard; total scope 3 and each category’s emissions in tonnes of CO2 equivalent, excluding biogenic CO2 and independent of any offsets or allowances; the list of categories included and of exclusions with their justification; the base year, its rationale and the recalculation policy; each category’s biogenic CO2, reported separately; and, for every category, data sources and their quality, methods, allocation rules and assumptions, and the share calculated with supplier data.

If your inventory also follows ISO 14064-1:2018, the same data feed its categories 3 to 6 through a mapping table. For verification, see our ISO 14064-3 verification guide; to tell an inventory apart from a product footprint, see carbon footprint vs LCA. The heaviest categories then become the priorities of your decarbonisation strategy.

Is your scope 3 ready to send?

• The value chain is mapped at a fixed date.
  
• All 15 categories have a screening estimate and are ranked by size.
  
• Relevance criteria are written down and applied to each category.
  
• Each category is “included”, “not applicable” or “excluded with a justification”.
  
• Categories 9 to 12 are not excluded selectively.
  
• The split between categories 4 and 9 follows Incoterms and who pays for transport.
  
• Capital goods bought in the year are counted in full in category 2.
  
• The technical guidance method is named for each category.
  
• Every emission factor has its source, year and geography.
  
• Data quality is scored on the five indicators.
  
• The share calculated with supplier data is known per category.
  
• Biogenic CO2 and avoided emissions are reported separately.