Scope 1, 2, 3 Emissions — What’s the Difference?
There’s no shortage of sustainability content floating around — ESG reports, brand pledges, carbon targets. And almost all of them mention “Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions” like it’s self-explanatory. It isn’t. A lot of us try to keep up — we pick up fragments, we scan reports, we catch the headlines. But when it comes to how emissions are actually counted — where the categories begin, end, and overlap — the gaps show up fast. And it’s not because we’re not paying attention. It’s because the language was never designed to be clear. It was designed to be technical. Precise, yes. But not exactly user-friendly. So here’s a quiet breakdown of what Scope 1, 2, and 3 actually mean — without the jargon, without the filler, and without the performance.
Why These Categories Exist
Before Scope 1, 2, and 3 were formalized, companies could choose which emissions to talk about — and which ones to ignore. Most focused on what was close to home: fuel they burned themselves, electricity they paid for. The rest — like emissions from suppliers, shipping, or customer use — didn’t always make the cut.
The Scope system was introduced to stop that — formalized in the early 2000s by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, a joint initiative between the World Resources Institute and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. It’s since become the global standard for structuring how emissions are counted, compared, and disclosed.
It’s a way of structuring responsibility — breaking emissions down by who causes them, who controls them, and who benefits from them. It doesn’t mean every company has full control over every category. But it does mean they have to account for the systems they rely on.
Because at some point, a brand can’t keep claiming sustainability if it only counts the parts it owns.
What the Scopes Actually Mean
Here’s the simple version:
Scope 1 is everything a company burns itself.
Scope 2 is the energy it buys from someone else.
Scope 3 is everything else the company depends on — but doesn’t directly own.
If a company owns a factory and runs it on gas, that’s Scope 1. If they buy electricity to power their office or stores, that’s Scope 2. And if they outsource production, ship products around the world, and customers use and eventually toss those products — that’s all Scope 3.
Most of the fashion industry lives in Scope 3. Design, marketing, retail might be in-house, but raw materials, manufacturing, logistics, even customer care habits — those are all technically “external.” Until they’re not. Because emissions don’t care who owns the factory. They just happen.
Why Fashion Can’t Skip Scope 3
Most emissions in fashion happen far from the office.
Not in the marketing department. Not in the HQ lighting system. Not even in the retail store. They happen in the fields, factories, freight systems, and homes — the places where materials are grown, garments are sewn, clothes are shipped, worn, washed, and eventually thrown out.
And all of that falls under Scope 3.
The fashion supply chain is long, global, and outsourced. That doesn’t make Scope 3 optional. It just makes it inconvenient. Which is probably why it gets skipped, downplayed, or filed under “we’re working on it.”
But this is where most of the impact lives. Brands that claim sustainability without accounting for Scope 3 are only telling a fraction of the story — the part they physically own. The rest is still happening. It’s just off their books.
Why Scope 3 Can’t be Ignored…
When we talk about Scope 3 in fashion, we’re talking about almost everything that makes the industry run. It starts at the beginning — with the cotton fields, sheep farms, or petroleum wells that supply the raw materials. These aren’t owned by the brand, but they’re used because of the brand. The irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides, or drilling — that’s the first layer of Scope 3.
Then the material moves — to spinners, dyers, and finishers, often in another country, running machines powered by electricity or coal. The brand might not even know what the energy source is, but the emissions still count. Not directly. But indirectly — because it couldn’t happen without them. Cut-and-sew factories come next. More transport. Sometimes by boat. Sometimes by air. Deadlines and drops dictate the mode — not emissions. Either way, that fuel gets burned. Then packaging. Warehousing. Distribution. Scope 3.
Then the customer buys it. Takes it home. Washes it, dries it, maybe irons it — again and again, for years. If the fabric needs frequent care or special treatment, those emissions add up. The brand doesn’t pay the electricity bill, but it shaped the outcome. And eventually, the garment is discarded. Landfilled, incinerated, donated, or recycled. If it was made to fall apart quickly, or if there was no infrastructure to take it back — that’s Scope 3 too.
That’s the full arc. Not just what a company makes — but everything that happens because they made it.
No Neat Ending
Before I close this out, I want to be clear about why I even wrote this.
The point of all this wasn’t to decode every line of every emissions report. It was just to explain what Scope emissions actually are — what they measure, how they’re structured, and why they matter. Because when I was first trying to make sense of all this — especially in the middle of technical jargon, sustainability reports, and half-explained infographics — it wasn’t exactly intuitive. So if this helped even a little, then it did what it was supposed to do.
Scope 1, 2, and 3 aren’t a branding exercise. They’re just the structure — the accounting system behind all the glossy claims.
They don’t tell you whether a brand is good or bad. But they do tell you whether the brand is even paying attention to the right things. And if Scope 3 is missing, you’re not getting the full picture. That doesn’t mean every brand has full control. Most don’t. But emissions are still happening — in supply chains, in shipping lanes, in laundry machines, and landfills — because something was made, marketed, and sold. This framework doesn’t solve that. But it’s where honesty starts.