60% of a corporate carbon footprint sits in ten emission sources

Cutting emissions looks like a thousand small decisions. Our data says it is closer to ten big ones.

Ask a company where its emissions come from and you get a long list. Thousands of suppliers. Tens of thousands of invoices. It looks impossible to act on.

We pulled the data from a sample of the carbon inventories we have built to see what the list actually looks like. It is far shorter than people think.

The short version:
1. Ten purchase types carry most of a company's footprint.

2. The biggest single one usually carries almost half.

3. Finding those ten requires going through every invoice. Acting on them requires a few meetings.

4. The long tail matters for reporting. It matters very little for reduction.

01 - The finding

Ten things decide most of your footprint

The single largest category made up almost half of a company's emissions in our sample. Zoom in to individual emission factors, the level where you can actually change something, and the ten largest made up around 60%.

The typical inventory drew on more than 400 distinct emission factors to get there. Ten of them carried the result.

The most common largest category was IT equipment. Consulting and operational services came next. After that it varied by company: freight, flights, food, building materials, cleaning supplies.

Each of those is a category. The calculation underneath goes to the specific product and supplier, which is where a category turns into something you can change.

The exact ten differ from one company to the next. The pattern holds regardless. Ten lines usually tell you where the emissions are.

02 - The spread

Some companies are ten decisions. Some are one.

The median hides a wide range, and the range is the useful part.

At one end of our sample, a single purchase type made up close to 90% of a company's footprint. For a company in that position, the entire reduction strategy is one supplier conversation and one specification decision.

At the other end, the largest purchase type was a few percent, and the emissions were spread across dozens of categories. That company has a structural question about what it buys, and a longer road.

Both are legitimate results. What you cannot do is guess which one you are. The two demand completely different budgets and completely different plans, and the only way to find out is to build the inventory.

03 - Why the list is so short

Categories are checklists. Emissions are not.

Scope 3 is usually said to make up 70 to 90% of a company's footprint. In our sample it was around 95%. Everything else, the offices and the vehicles and the electricity, was usually the remaining few percent.

Inside Scope 3, the same thing happens again. Scope 3 has fifteen categories, and every reporting framework treats all fifteen as equally worth filling in.

In our sample the typical company had emissions in seven of them. One category, purchased goods and services, made up over 80% of Scope 3. Business travel was next at around 1%.

Fifteen boxes on the form. Seven with anything in them. One that decides the answer.

04 - What a single invoice contains

Most are simple. A few are enormous.

Every emission in an inventory starts as a line on an invoice. We turn each line into one or more emission activities: what was bought, how much, from whom.

More than half of all invoices in our sample produced exactly one activity. Simple purchases, one line, one factor. A small share of invoices did the opposite. The most complex single document in our sample broke into several hundred separate activities.

Those few complex invoices are where the concentration lives. A spend-based model collapses each of them into a single amount and loses the information that says which purchase inside it carried the carbon.

05 - What to do with your ten

You have the list. Now use it.

A real inventory hands you the ten. What happens next is where the value is.

1. Read the shape. If your top ten is 80% of the footprint, you have a procurement project. If it is 30%, you have a strategy question. Same data, different plan.

2. Check what each of the ten rests on. We grade every emission factor from A to E by how specific its source is. A means verified data from the supplier about the exact product. E means an industry average standing in until something better arrives. Your ten deserve A and B.

3. Go one level down. "IT equipment" is a category. A specific laptop model from a specific supplier is a decision. The ten only become actionable at product level.

4. Take them to procurement. Who supplies them, what the alternatives are, what switching costs. Some of the ten will also be where the savings are. Start there.

5. Track them, not everything. Ten sources are trackable year over year. When one moves, you can say why.

6. Re-rank once a year. New purchasing and better data reorder the list. That is the inventory working.

06 - Why it matters now

Targets need a short list

CSRD asks you to show your Scope 3 was assessed on data. SBTi asks for numbers that move when you change what you buy. Ten concentrated, graded sources do both. A footprint spread across hundreds of averages does neither.

07 - Common mistakes

Where this goes wrong

1. Starting with the biggest invoice. The biggest bill and the biggest emission are often different lines.

2. Chasing the tail. Going from 80% coverage to 95% adds dozens of factors and changes very little about what to do first.

About this data

Drawn from a sample of carbon inventories Bardo has built: hundreds of thousands of invoices, close to a million individual emission lines. Nordic companies, mid-sized, across many industries. Figures are medians, so a single large company cannot skew the result. Everything is aggregated and anonymised. Company examples are rounded.

Boundary: this dataset covers upstream emissions, since the inventories in the sample are built from invoices and purchases. Downstream categories such as use of sold products and investments are outside this sample.

Our factor grading scale is explained on the methodology page.

Standards and references:

GHG Protocol Scope 3

Standard GHG Protocol Technical Guidance for Calculating Scope 3 Emissions ISO

ISO 14067 (product carbon footprint)