Scope 3 categories: the complete GHG Protocol list

Materiality is concentrated. For most services companies, categories 1 (purchased goods and services), 2 (capital goods) and 6 (business travel) carry nearly everything. For manufacturers, category 1 plus 4 (upstream transport) and 11 (use of sold products, if products consume energy). For logistics, fuel is Scope 1 and the subcontracted fleet is category 4. A spend-based screening pass, like the one our demo runs, is the standard way to find your own concentration before spending money on data collection. The definitions above come from the GHG Protocol Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Standard; the overview of all three scopes is on our scope 1 2 3 emissions page.

In practice, category classification is an accounts-payable problem: ten thousand invoice lines, each needing a scope, a category and a factor. That is the exact classification pass our carbon accounting software automates: AI drafts the mapping line by line with a stated confidence, a human reviews the low-confidence tail, and every decision stays attached to the source line. See what scope 3 emissions reporting then requires, or read the plain-language Scope 3 definition first.