If you have started looking into carbon reporting recently, you may have hit the Scope 3 wall. While Scopes 1 and 2 are relatively easy to wrap your head around (it’s just your own fuel and electricity, after all), Scope 3 is the vast, messy world of your entire value chain. For the average UK business, especially in ecommerce or manufacturing, the packaging you buy is a silent contributor to your 'Purchased Goods and Services' footprint, otherwise known as Category 1.
Scope 3 emissions are quite often the invisible part of a business’s environmental impact. According to the CDP, supply chain emissions are, on average, 26 times higher than a company’s direct operational emissions. When you buy a thousand shipping mailers, you are effectively inheriting the carbon generated to harvest the raw materials, that manufacture the product and ship it to your warehouse.
As you might imagine then, if you are still using heavy, virgin-plastic packaging, your Scope 3 numbers are going to stay stubbornly high. The goal for 2026 is to move away from spend-based reporting, where you just guess your emissions based on how much you paid, and toward 'supplier-specific' data. This is where collaborating with a partner like us comes in, enabling you to find out the both recycled content and weight of your items, saving you time and stress for your reporting purposes.
We often get asked which certifications support Scope 3 reporting. While an FSC® (Forest Stewardship Council) stamp doesn;t give you a literal carbon number, it acts as a data proxy. It proves that the material has not come from a high-carbon-loss event like deforestation.
When you are putting together an ESG report, (Environmental, Social, and Governance) you need audit-ready evidence. Using products that are certified by ISO 14001 or have clear Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) allows your sustainability lead to upgrade from guesswork, effectively turning a vague claim like 'we use eco-friendly boxes' into a hard metric like '100% of our transit packaging is FSC®-certified, reducing our Category 1 risk profile.'
One of the simplest ways to demonstrate packaging sustainability in an ESG report is through material reduction, or right-sizing. It is an easy decision, if you use a box that’s 20% smaller, you are using 20% less material. That’s a 20% reduction in the embodied carbon of that specific purchase.
Showing this information in an ESG report is straightforward. Allpack customers can access detailed reports on their ordered materials and products through the online portal to help with ESG reporting, or they can request Technical Data Sheets to verify the composition of the products they use.
If you are reviewing your packaging setup this year, now is a sensible time to take a closer look at your material data sheets. A quick audit of your weights and recycled content percentages can often reveal a path to both lower taxes and increase sustainability credentials. Send us a message, email sales@allpack.uk.com, or phone us on 01543 396 700 to find out more. We are always happy to have a practical conversation about how this could work for your business and help you navigate these changes without the headaches.