Scope 1 2 3 emissions examples: a SaaS company, a manufacturer and a logistics fleet

The fastest way to understand scope 1 2 3 emissions is not another definition, it is examples: the same kinds of invoices, classified for three different businesses, with the reasoning written down. Below, a SaaS company, a light manufacturer and a logistics operator walk through their real expense types line by line. The same fuel invoice will land in three different places depending on who owns the vehicle, which is the whole lesson.

The ground rules, once: Scope 1 is combustion and leaks from assets you control, Scope 2 is energy you purchase and consume, Scope 3 is everything else in the value chain, split into 15 categories. Full definitions are on our scope 1 2 3 emissions guide; this post is deliberately all cases.

Example 1: a 150-person SaaS company

No factory, no fleet, one office. The naive expectation is "we barely have a footprint"; the classified ledger says otherwise, it is just concentrated in Scope 3.

• Office electricity, 82,400 kWh on your meter contract: Scope 2. The one big Scope 2 line most services companies have. Location-based from the grid factor; market-based if you hold a green tariff.
• Office gas heating, 6,200 therms: Scope 1, stationary combustion. Often the only Scope 1 line a software company has, plus the occasional HVAC refrigerant recharge, which is also Scope 1 and disproportionately large per kilogram.
• AWS and Google Cloud, $225,000: Scope 3, category 1. The cloud is a purchased service running on someone else's electricity. For SaaS this is routinely the largest single Scope 3 line, and it is the one most often wrongly dropped as "not physical".
• Laptops and monitors, $109,000: Scope 3, category 2, capital goods. Hardware is capex, not a consumed service; it books in the purchase year.
• Flights and hotels for offsites, $72,000: Scope 3, category 6, business travel. The travel agency invoice, the airline invoice and the hotel folio all route to 6.
• Transit passes for staff, $15,600: Scope 3, category 7, commuting. Not travel: the journey is home to office.
• Office lease with energy in the service charge: if the landlord holds the meters, that energy is Scope 3, category 8, not Scope 2. The moment the meter contract is yours, it moves.
• Marketing agency, insurance, catering, office supplies: all Scope 3, category 1, purchased services, with insurance carrying a deliberately low spend factor and low confidence.

Resulting shape: Scope 1 a few percent, Scope 2 maybe 10 to 15%, Scope 3 the rest, dominated by cloud, hardware and travel. The reduction levers are procurement levers: cloud region and provider, hardware refresh cycles, travel policy.

Example 2: a light manufacturer, 400 people, one plant

Metal fabrication: buys steel and aluminum, runs machines and furnaces, ships product to distributors.

• Plant electricity, 1.24 GWh: Scope 2, and finally a big one. Machine tools, compressors and lighting make electricity a top-three line.
• Natural gas for furnaces and ovens, 84,000 therms: Scope 1, stationary combustion, the classic industrial Scope 1 line.
• Propane for forklifts, diesel for the yard truck, gasoline for the sales fleet: all Scope 1, mobile combustion, because the company operates the vehicles. Three different fuels, one scope.
• R-404A recharge on process cooling, 6 kg: Scope 1, fugitive. About 23 tonnes CO2e from a $2,300 service invoice; per dollar, the most emission-dense line in the whole ledger.
• Steel coil $486,000, aluminum profiles $132,000: Scope 3, category 1, and with heavy material factors these two lines alone usually beat the entire Scope 1 and 2 total. This is what "Scope 3 is 70 to 90%" looks like concretely.
• The new CNC mill, $218,000: Scope 3, category 2, capital goods, booked in the purchase year, which makes year-over-year comparisons lumpy and is why capex is tracked separately.
• Inbound freight $96,000 and outbound LTL freight $142,000, both paid by us: both Scope 3, category 4. Direction does not matter; paying for the freight does. If a customer collects with their own carrier, that leg is category 9.
• Scrap hauling, landfill waste, wastewater treatment: Scope 3, category 5.
• Trade-show flights, supplier audit trips: category 6; the employee shift shuttle the company subsidises: category 7; the leased overflow warehouse where the landlord holds the meter: category 8.

Resulting shape: Scope 1 and 2 perhaps a quarter of the total, category 1 materials roughly half. The data strategy writes itself: meter everything on site, then chase supplier-specific data for steel and aluminum, because a supplier switching to electric-arc recycled steel moves your number more than any office initiative ever will.

Example 3: a logistics operator, 60 trucks

The mirror image of the SaaS company: here the footprint lives in Scope 1.

• Linehaul diesel, 148,000 gallons for owned tractors: Scope 1, mobile combustion, roughly 1,500 tonnes CO2e and far and away the biggest line. Reefer-unit diesel is the same call.
• Subcontracted carriers, $388,000: Scope 3, category 4. The same diesel, burned in someone else's truck under your load, changes scope entirely. A fleet that shifts volume to subcontractors reduces its Scope 1 and grows its category 4; total value-chain emissions barely move, which is exactly what the scope structure is designed to reveal.
• Leased day cabs on operating lease, fueled by us: the fuel is Scope 1 (we operate them); the lease itself is category 8. Tractor purchases are category 2.
• Warehouse electricity 386,000 kWh: Scope 2. Dock heating gas: Scope 1.
• Intermodal rail legs, $54,000: category 4, with a much lighter factor than road, which is why modal shift is a real reduction lever and not a slogan.
• Tires, brake parts, DEF, pallets, corrugate: category 1 goods; shop maintenance services and truck washes: category 1 services; driver layover hotels: category 6; the dock staff vanpool subsidy: category 7; terminal waste and used-oil collection: category 5.

Resulting shape: Scope 1 can exceed half the total, and the classification burden is different: fewer boundary puzzles, more volume discipline, because fuel data must reconcile gallon by gallon across hundreds of fuel-card statements.

Edge cases all three companies share

Different as the three ledgers look, the awkward lines are the same everywhere, and they are worth settling once in a written policy rather than re-arguing at every close.

• Remote work energy. Employees working from home consume heating and electricity that appears on nobody's invoice to the company. It belongs in Scope 3, category 7, alongside commuting, and it is estimated rather than metered: headcount, remote share, working days per year, and an average energy figure per home working day. The estimate is coarse, and that is acceptable; label the method, state the assumptions, and move on.
• Company cards versus expense reports. The same flight can enter the ledger three ways: a travel agency invoice, a corporate card statement, and an employee reimbursement claim. All are category 6, and the classification is the easy part; the trap is double counting when two feeds carry the same trip. Pick one authoritative source per spend type and deduplicate the others, exactly as you would in any AP consolidation.
• The mid-year vehicle sale. The manufacturer sells its yard truck in June and subcontracts the work. January to June fuel is Scope 1, mobile combustion; July onwards the same work appears as a contractor invoice in category 4. Total value-chain emissions barely change, the scope split does, and the year-over-year Scope 1 drop needs a footnote, not a celebration.
• Intercompany recharges. When one entity in the consolidated group invoices another, the line looks like a purchased service and is nothing of the sort. Inside the reporting boundary, intercompany flows are eliminated exactly as in financial consolidation; counting them as category 1 double counts emissions the group already reports as Scope 1 or 2 elsewhere. This is one of the quieter ways Scope 3 totals inflate in multi-entity groups.

How the numbers change when methods improve

Every line above carries a method as well as a scope, and the method moves the number more than most people expect. Take three lines from the examples and upgrade them. The SaaS company's cloud spend starts life as a spend-based estimate: dollars multiplied by an industry-average factor for hosting services. When the provider's own energy and emissions reporting is brought in, the line is recomputed from usage, and the result can shift materially in either direction, because a dollar of cloud spend says almost nothing about which region's grid ran the workload. The manufacturer's steel line starts from a generic per-dollar factor for basic metals; a supplier-specific figure from an environmental product declaration, reflecting actual recycled content and production route, can change that single line by a large fraction of the whole inventory. The logistics operator's subcontracted freight moves from dollars to tonne-kilometres, which stops the line from inflating every time carrier rates rise.

Three things follow. First, an improved number is not evidence of a real-world change: the trucks burned the same diesel, the ledger just measured it better, so method changes are disclosed per line and, where material, the comparison year is recomputed on the new method. Second, improvement is not always downwards; companies that expect refinement to flatter them are frequently disappointed, and the honest posture is to want accuracy, not a smaller number. Third, upgrades are prioritized by materiality: refining the insurance line achieves nothing, refining steel or cloud changes the shape of the inventory. The method hierarchy, spend-based to average activity data to supplier-specific data, is covered in what carbon accounting is; the point here is that the classification stays put while the quantification underneath it matures.

A classification checklist you can reuse

The three companies' decisions compress into a short sequence of questions. Asked in order against any AP line, they classify the overwhelming majority of a ledger.

• Did we burn it, or did it leak from our equipment? Fuel combusted in assets we operate, and refrigerants or other gases escaping from them: Scope 1. Ownership on paper matters less than operational control; a leased truck we fuel and dispatch counts.
• Is the energy on our contract? Electricity, heat, steam or cooling purchased on our own meter contract: Scope 2. The same energy bought by a landlord and recharged through a service fee: category 8. The test is the contract, not the building.
• Who pays for the freight? Transport we pay for, inbound or outbound: category 4. Transport paid by our customer or arranged further downstream: category 9. Direction is irrelevant; the invoice is not.
• Is it capex? Anything capitalised, machines, vehicles, buildings, hardware: category 2, booked in the purchase year. Everything else bought from a supplier that is not energy, freight or waste: category 1.
• Where does the journey start? Home to workplace, including home working energy: category 7. Workplace to anywhere on business: category 6.
• Is it a waste contract? Disposal and treatment of our operational waste and wastewater: category 5.
• Is the counterparty inside the group? If yes, eliminate the line; it is already someone's Scope 1 or 2 within the boundary.
• None of the above? It is one of the rarer downstream categories (processing, use of sold products, end of life, investments) or outside the value chain entirely. Park it with a note rather than forcing a fit.

Two habits make the checklist durable. Write the answer down per line, including the confidence, so next year's close inherits reasoning instead of bare conclusions; and run new spend types through the list when they first appear, not in a panic at year end. The Scope 1 and 2 boundary questions, which generate the most internal debate for the least tonnage, are treated at length in our Scope 1 and Scope 2 post.

The one table to remember

Across all three companies, the same decision pattern repeats. Fuel burned in an asset you operate: Scope 1. Energy on your meter contract: Scope 2. The same energy on your landlord's contract: category 8. Freight you pay for, either direction: category 4; freight you do not pay for: category 9. Employees to the office: category 7; employees to a client: category 6. Anything you bought that is not capex: category 1; capex: category 2. Waste contracts: category 5. If a line does not fit those tests, it is one of the rarer downstream categories or it is out of the value chain entirely, and our Scope 3 definition post covers those edges.

If you want these examples live rather than on the page: the Scope Classifier demo ships with all three companies above as hand-built samples, 28 to 34 lines each, and classifies them in front of you, scope chips, category numbers, factors and confidence per line. Paste your own AP lines and it will make the same calls on your data, which is the honest way to evaluate carbon accounting software before giving anyone an email address.