Every load your organization moves is already in the LiveLOADS record — lane, mode, weight, distance, carrier. Scope 3 reporting is what happens when you read that record as carbon.
Scope 1 is your own fuel. Scope 2 is your electricity. Scope 3 is everything your organization causes but doesn't own — and for a manufacturer, producer, or distributor, the biggest slice by far is freight: the trucks and rail cars your carriers run on your behalf.
That creates an odd accounting reality. The diesel burn belongs to your carrier's Scope 1 — but the GHG Protocol counts it as your Scope 3, because you bought the movement. You own the number without owning the trucks. And increasingly, your customers own the ask: retailer scorecards, CDP questionnaires, and procurement teams all want supplier emissions data, in a standard format, on a deadline.
The hard part was never the math. It's that most mid-market shippers can't produce a complete, load-by-load record of what moved, where, how, and how far. That's exactly the record LiveLOADS already builds.
Upstream transportation & distribution. Inbound raw materials and components — the freight your suppliers' carriers, or yours, moved to your plants.
Downstream transportation & distribution. Your finished goods moving out to customers and distribution centres.
Reported under the GHG Protocol, calculated along GLEC Framework methods, requested by CDP and big-box vendor scorecards. The paperwork is standardized. The inputs usually aren't.
Every load in the platform already carries origin, destination, mode, weight, and carrier. Emissions reporting adds zero data entry — the audit trail does the collecting.
Each shipment is converted using mode-specific emission factors, following the GLEC Framework — the recognized standard for logistics emissions accounting.
Where carriers report primary data — actual fuel, actual distance — it replaces default factors. Estimates where that's all there is, measured data where it isn't. Each figure labeled so auditors know which is which.
Category 4 and 9 totals by period, per carrier, per lane — exported in the format CDP and retailer scorecards ask for, without a consultant translating in between.
Illustrative factors, per tonne of freight moved one kilometre — the orders of magnitude that make intermodal conversations interesting:
Illustrative ranges aligned with published GLEC-consistent factors for North American operations. Actual reporting uses the current factor tables, per mode and fuel type.
When a retail customer or CDP asks for supplier emissions, the answer is a report, not a project. The data was already yours — now it's formatted for the question.
Who's fast, who's cheap, who's late — and now, who's clean. Carrier scorecards gain an emissions column, and renewal conversations gain a new axis that carriers are actively measured on.
Mode-shift opportunities surface from your own lanes: freight where intermodal trims two-thirds of the footprint at a tolerable time cost. Every tonne switched is in the record — verifiable, reportable, real.
An emissions figure nobody can trace is marketing, not reporting. Every number on the sustainability dashboard carries its shipment record with it — the same audit trail finance already trusts. Estimates are labeled estimates. Measured data is labeled measured. If a customer, an auditor, or your own sustainability committee asks where a figure came from, the answer is a document, not a methodology appendix.
The free freight audit maps your last 30 days of shipping — which is also the first month of your Scope 3 baseline. Keep the map either way.
Book your free audit →