What Are Scope 1-4 Emissions?

Transcript

Sheldon Young
Welcome to No Footprints, a podcast brought to you by Alfa Laval. I’m Sheldon Young.

Jason Moreau
And I’m Jason Moreau.

Sheldon Young
And we’re here to talk about impact and to share the efforts and people behind making sustainability real. Yes, sir, we are. That’s what we do, Jason, every day, all day.

Just come on here twice a month to share it with the world.

Jason Moreau
Exactly. But the days we’re not recording, it’s still happening 24-7, 365.

Sheldon Young
It is. Every day I see Jason, I walk in the office, I go, welcome to No Footprints, a podcast brought to you by Alfa Laval. And he nods, he nods and pauses and then says, yeah, I’m Jason Moreau.

We do it every day. It’s just kind of the way things are at Alfa Laval.

Jason Moreau
That’s right. You don’t get a nod game as strong as me without practice every day.

Sheldon Young
You have the best nod game in the business. I mean, if they gave like awards, I think the Signal Awards or Podcast Award, if they gave a Signal Award for Nodder of the Year, that would be you.

Jason Moreau
The Ed McMahon Lifetime Achievement Award goes to…

Sheldon Young
Exactly. Exactly. Now you’re talking my language.

All right. Enough fun. Let’s get to real things.

Jason, what is your sustainability story today?

Jason Moreau
Well, mine is kind of like a science nerd thing.

Sheldon Young
Here we go.

Jason Moreau
I like this.

Sheldon Young
I’m already in.

Jason Moreau
All right. Good. So, their researchers were messing around, trying to figure out how to improve the dehydration process.

Oh. So, obviously, dehydration used…

Sheldon Young
It’s like foods and fruits and stuff?

Jason Moreau
Yeah. Exactly. It uses a lot of heat and energy, obviously, to draw the moisture out of the fruit.

And so, basically, what they did is they used food-safe calcium chloride, which I wasn’t familiar with, but apparently is used in different cheeses and things like that. So, it’s an ingredient that’s already known in food production. And so, they put that at the bottom of the dehydrator, and then they created a vacuum.

Sheldon Young
Oh.

Jason Moreau
Interesting. And at room temperature, so no additional heat, just that setup drew out 95% of the water mass, which is equivalent to industrial-level dehydrating. Wow.

Yeah. So, what’s really cool is it dehydrated the fruit, which is what you want, and maintained its color and texture and all of those things. No additional energy to raise the temperature.

And then you can recycle the water that was drawn off of the fruit and reuse the calcium chloride. So, it’s not even… Yeah, yeah.

So, I thought it was a really cool experiment. Obviously, just at a very kind of a bench phase experiment, not scaling up, but looked pretty promising. And yeah, I thought that was really cool to look at something, I think, as common or known as dehydration and go, I don’t know, how do we do that differently?

How do we do that with less energy? How do we… So, I thought that was pretty cool.

Sheldon Young
Yeah. Sorry, it made me think of… Are you familiar with Cathabar, the thing that we have here at Alfa Laval?

I am. Yeah, it’s… I mean, it sounded like that, because that uses what’s called a liquid desiccant.

And it’s to pull moisture out, and it uses kind of a… I wonder, like, my man, could we use one of those? I’m going to go down to the Kathabar and bring some fruit and see if we can dehydrate it.

So pretty interesting. Yeah. That’s a neat one, Jason.

Good find. Yeah. I’d love to hear more about it.

I’m going to go read about it now, because I want to know how much energy does it save, you know, in that process and all that. Yeah. Cool.

All right. So, this episode, Jason… Last episode, I talked about…

I gave some wonderful post-Halloween pumpkin tips. Yep. Now, we’re approaching Thanksgiving.

Yeah. Holiday season. I’m going to give a few tips.

And I pulled these… Again, I went to a couple of sources on the interwebs, but I like the ideas. I’m going to share them.

How do you make for a more sustainable Thanksgiving? Because Thanksgiving is pretty much a holiday where we go a little bit in excess, sometimes. And if you’re not careful, you can make a bigger impact than you really want to on many things, including my waistline, if I’m not careful.

So, let’s… If you go, like, say… So, for example, one thing you could do…

All the foods you buy. We buy lots of vegetables and meats, all kinds of stuff, and fruits, all kinds of things for Thanksgiving, try to buy them local. Try to find some local things.

Go to your farmer’s markets that are nearby and buy some stuff there. Use vegetables that are in season and try to minimize impact. Because, again, if you’re buying…

Just go in the grocery store and buying stuff, that gets shipped from many, many far places. And there’s a lot of carbon footprint that goes with that. So, buy local.

Number two, reduce waste. Now, again, this is tricky, again, because you don’t want to have… No one wants to have a run-out-of-food situation Thanksgiving.

That doesn’t make anybody happy. But we often cook and make way too much. I know I’ve been to Thanksgiving dinners that have, like, eight people and seven pies.

Okay, that’s a lot. Now, again, that gets eaten over days. But a lot of times, things get thrown out.

So, ways to kind of deal with that. You can freeze a lot of things, right? I know that my parents and my grandma used to make TV dinners.

They used to get, like, these little… These aluminum trays to make TV dinners. And they would, like, fill them.

And have, like, little turkey dinners that they would then cover and freeze and eat them, you know, whenever they wanted them. And so, doing that freezing, making some TV dinners kind of stuff. Have alternative recipes for leftovers.

Okay, you get leftover turkey. We’ll make, obviously, turkey sandwiches. But you could make a, you know, a turkey pot pie.

You could make all kinds of different things with leftovers. So, think about that. Have some recipes ready to go.

So, you know, if you’re making something that has leftovers, that doesn’t get thrown out. Or even, I’m just going to say, I’ll throw it out there. Have an alternative meal.

My wife and I don’t eat turkey on Thanksgiving. Why? Because it’s just two of us, usually.

And so, we don’t want to cook a whole turkey. So, we do something different. We actually have done several different things.

And we’ll make just a minimalist meal. We’ll make a nice meal. But it’s just kind of something for us to do.

I know that’s…

Jason Moreau
I can’t believe you admitted that publicly.

Sheldon Young
I know. I know. I might be excommunicated for that.

But, you know, whatever makes you happy. Think about your impact and try to minimize it. That’s what I’m going at for my Thanksgiving tips.

That’s an excellent message. Oh, yeah. Finally.

That was just a food one. Sorry. I had more.

I had more, Jason. Wow. Just a couple more.

Minimize your disposables. Try not to use… I know it’s sometimes simpler and easier to use, like, a lot of paper napkins, a lot of plastic wear, things like that.

Try to minimize that if you can. Don’t be afraid to wash some stuff. But just be sensible about what you’re wasting.

Because a lot of that can go down into the landfills. And then travel mindfully. That was the final one.

Sorry. Think about carpooling. Think about traveling in times where you’re not getting stuck in traffic jams.

I know it can be a little inconvenient. But a lot of getting stuck in traffic jams just burns gas is all it does. And so the more we can do to kind of smooth that out, the better.

All right. That’s it. Those are my tips, Jason.

That’s all right.

Jason Moreau
Cut myself short on there. That’s the excuse for people who don’t want to travel to go see their family. It’s like, man, I’m doing my part to save the planet.

I’m sorry. You’re going to have to do it without me.

Sheldon Young
We’ll do a virtual Thanksgiving. Here we go. There’s Uncle Larry.

I’ve got to turn it off now. Turn the volume down on my virtual Thanksgiving. Wait until he finishes his rant.

Okay. Now we can turn it back. There we go.

There we go. All right. Good, good, good.

All right. So there’s a couple of good kickoff stories, Jason. Thank you for sharing yours.

I really like it. I’m going to go look into that. I thought it was fun.

Jason Moreau
Yep.

Sheldon Young
Okay. Now, today, folks, we’re going to talk about emission scopes. Now, I know a lot of people, if you’re in the sustainability world or in tune with it, you probably know all about the scope.

So let’s go up to 1, 2, 3, but there’s also a scope 4. Now, it’s not necessarily reported on much or it’s not a formal official scope, but it’s talked about more and more. And so we’re going to bring that into the vernacular as well.

The rest of the episode here, we’re going to be talking of, you know, a lot of this is for folks that maybe don’t know as much about the scopes who want to learn a little bit. And I’m going to also talk a little bit about impact of those scopes. And I’ve got a little section in there, Jason, for you around how do we market and educate people about the scopes so that they actually start to care about them and want to do something about them.

And I want your insights on that to share. So for those of you that know about the scopes, that part alone is going to be the great takeaway from this whole thing is hearing Jason talk about great things. Oh, geez.

All right.

Jason Moreau
No pressure. Okay. Yeah.

Sure.

Sheldon Young
You’re the one. You’re the important part. I’m just here for just here for scrolling and clicking.

All right. Okay. So let’s just jump right into it.

We’re going to unpack that world of carbon emissions scope one through four. It’s not just for the pros, right? But anyone who cares about the future of our planet will get something from this and understand where emissions come from and kind of like how do we impact them.

So emission scopes are basically the categories that used to measure and report greenhouse gas emissions. So if you’re doing a sustainability report, you’ll often see scope one, two, three. And we’re going to talk about each one of those.

Oftentimes scope three is the big one, but it’s also kind of the most amorphous and difficult to kind of get your arms around because it’s not necessarily in your control. So we’re going to talk about a little bit, but organizations break these into categories so they can kind of understand where the impact is coming from and then have levers to reduce those. Right.

So first part of any problem solving is understanding the problem and breaking the emissions into scope buckets lets us understand the sources and how and where they’re coming from. So that we can then deliver actions. I guess an example could be like, think about when you sort your recyclables in trash, right?

Recyclables, compostables, landfill. Like you see that you walk into a Starbucks sometimes, they have kind of three bins and you have to decide where do I put this straw cover? It’s like, sometimes it’s confusing, but it will show you.

Okay, this is what we call landfill stuff. This is what we call recyclable stuff. Scopes help you do that.

So you can determine where to allocate buckets. That’s really kind of the thing. All right.

So now let’s just kind of dive into scopes one by one. We’re going to start with scope one. Scope one is the one, frankly, that I work with most in my work because I work with organizations and companies that are trying to lower the impact of their operations within their houses, basically.

Right. So let’s just pick any factory. If I’m a factory that’s, I’m a bakery, for example, and I have a gas oven and I’m burning gas to make my thing, that’s a scope one emission.

I’m creating emissions from the operations that I’m using to produce or deliver my goods. Right. You could also, if you have a truck that is delivering those baked goods, because that truck is your own truck and you’re using it to deliver things, that’s counted in scope one.

Okay. So that’s kind of the definition of it. It is often, say, much, much smaller than scope three, but is also one of the most controllable ones you have.

If you look internally at your operations and understand how you’re delivering and making something, creating something, you may have a number of levers to change how that’s done or to recover heat or to prevent CO2. I could go from a gas oven to an electric oven. Now, again, there may be emissions created from that electricity, and we’ll talk about that in a second, but it may be lower than, say, the impact of you using natural gas yourself.

Right. So there’s different aspects to it. So in terms of scope one, it’s that stuff that’s controllable and it’s yours that you can control with your operations.

So how do you make sustainability real for this? You choose what fuel you use to heat with. For example, in many cases, you choose how much heat to use and stuff.

You may look at your operations and say, hey, I can actually do this a little differently and lower the amount of steam I need to do for something just by changing the process itself. Hot water. Sometimes you’re using it to create hot water.

Well, maybe I can use over here. I’m cooling hot water with a cooling tower. Well, what if I just took that hot water and use it to preheat water before I use cooling tower?

Well, OK, you’ve recovered heat. Instead of dumping it out a cooling tower at the top of your factory, you now have taken it and recovered it into a worthy thing in your process, meaning you don’t need steam to heat that water instead. That’s how you can make it real in your operations.

Like, say, in our own day to day, I mean, I just kind of gave an example. Do I leave the oven running for too long? How long do I preheat my oven?

Some people, you know, I’ll turn it on, I’ll come back in 45 minutes. It’ll be good. OK, well, I’m making a pretty substantial choice there, right?

My scope one is 45 minutes of oven time at 400 degrees before I bake my cookies when it’s probably preheated in about 10 or 15. Right? So that extra half hour is a choice.

And that’s a way I can look at it and make sure that I have direct impact.

Jason Moreau
And you’re saying all of this, the metric for measuring is the greenhouse gas emissions.

Sheldon Young
Yeah, typically. OK. Yeah.

And there’s different. Yeah. It’s all these emissions are essentially greenhouse gas emissions.

Jason Moreau
Yep. OK. Yep.

Sheldon Young
Yep. Yep. And yeah, and it’s typically from burning fossil fuels and things like that.

OK. Now scope to scope to scope to is indirect emissions for energy. So I talked about let’s say I’m I use the example of boiling something or gas oven where I’m burning the gas myself to create the oven versus an electric oven.

OK. I’m using electricity. Yeah.

I’m not creating emissions with gas. Well, you are indirectly. If the person supplying the electricity is using greenhouse gas, sorry, using greenhouse creating fuels to do so.

If they’re using a windmill to create that energy. Right. OK.

That’s that’s not creating emissions. That’s green energy. So there is no greenhouse.

You’ve done good. You’ve moved away from from greenhouse gas creation to something that is using a windmill to generate electricity to have the heat and power that you need. So scope to is basically electrical energy and the sources of your electrical energy.

It’s often one of the I must say easier ones to deal with. But you can work with your organization with your power companies and you can buy credits offset. But I’m talking about direct stuff.

I don’t I’m going to I’m not going to get into offsets and purchasing offsets and things like that. I want direct impact. You can one lower your electrical use.

That’s one thing you can do. You can lower electrical use. You can also change the source of what you get your electricity and the impact of that of that source.

Jason Moreau
Yeah. I feel like this is maybe where you see larger companies like if they have like a really big like warehouse space putting solar panels on the roof and stuff like that. Right.

So like they’re essentially. You know. Pulling electricity from a cleaner source than just pulling it from the grid.

Yeah. And so and so that would that would essentially impact their scope. Totally.

Sheldon Young
Totally. Absolutely. Yep.

Yep. Absolutely. Now again, it’s again, it’s not necessarily a perfect calculation, but yes, the short answer is yes.

Exactly how you make an impact. All right. Now scope three.

This is a trickier one. Scope three and four. A little trickier.

Scope three is essentially emissions from suppliers. Use of your product. Waste.

Travel. All kinds. It’s anything kind of outside of your walls, but impacted by things you produced in along those lines.

So if I ship my product to a warehouse. Okay, great. I use my truck.

Okay. That’s my personal truck. That’s scope.

Scope one. Now it’s at a warehouse. That gets distributed somewhere else or gets put in a ship and put across the ocean.

That’s scope three. Okay. Someone uses my product and it creates, utilizes fuel.

Let’s say I make a, make an oven. Okay. My, my company makes ovens.

Okay, great. Well, there’s a, it’s a gas oven. All right.

It’s using natural gas. Well, that’s creating scope three emissions. Okay.

There is, let’s see what else I’m missing with scope three. It’s for example, if my product uses, it’s upstream and downstream both. So that I’m talking, those are just kind of downstream away from our factory.

After the things are made upstream, let’s say I’m making, I don’t know, potato chips or something. There’s a bunch of emissions created from the production of those potatoes, right? All kinds of stuff.

You know, the, the tractors that are, you know, the pumping the water to, to, to, to keep them irrigated, trucking them to me and, you know, all that kind of stuff. All that is considered scope three emissions upstream. Okay.

So those two together upstream and downstream create your total scope three mission.

Jason Moreau
So in your earlier example of a bakery and they’re, they’re, they’re buying an electric, a new electric oven. Sure. They might be looking at two or three suppliers for those ovens.

Each one of those oven suppliers, the emissions that it took for them to produce that oven is scope three to the bakery. And so a sensible bakery or maybe a more progressive bakery might say, let me go with the one where it was, it was the company that focused more on building the same product in a more sustainable fashion. And that, does that improve scope three for the bakery?

If they buy that oven?

Sheldon Young
Technically, yes. I mean, the bigger emissions will be from the use of the oven more than likely. Sure.

Yeah.

Jason Moreau
And, but at that point it’s, it’s scope one using it. Correct. But like the purchase decision in terms of like your scope three footprint, am I thinking about that right?

Sheldon Young
You are, you are. Okay. If, if, if they can get the calculations for that.

And if it was, if it was a decision factor for them, you know, it’s going to be, I want to say challenging to get those numbers. It probably is going to be like, I know many companies do not have that calculation done for their product. For something that complicated.

Sure. Cause you also don’t know how far was it shipped and all that kind of stuff. Right.

All kinds of things. So technically you are correct. Practically difficult.

Okay. So, and they’re probably, honestly, they’re going to look at performance. They’re going to look at price.

And then they may look at, you know, if all else are equal, then someone may say, okay, less impact. I’m going to go somewhere where it becomes a little more, I would say relevant might be at a smaller ticket item, right? Where you start, people will start looking at, you know, sustainably made and using regenerative agriculture.

Those things are, it’s usually triggered through different words and different mechanisms. But at the end of the day, it’s, it will be like lower emissions typically or lower impact. Right.

Yeah. When they’re looking at stuff along those lines. So it’s really, you know, in terms of sustainability accounting, a lot of this stuff comes into play and sustainability accounting.

Right. In looking at the, the actual impact in your sustainability reports and any carbon credits that you might get, there are whole industries that get, get money, frankly, if they lower the, the carbon intensity of their production, right? There are whole industries that do that.

They get actually get true real value from it. And sometimes it’s more just like, Hey, we said we’re going to lower emissions and so we’re going to do that. They have to track it and understand their impact.

And scope three is again by far the hardest one to do.

Jason Moreau
Yeah. I feel like that’s not only the most challenging one from an accounting standpoint, but it feels like the one that’s just, I don’t know, from a practical standpoint, more I don’t know what’s the word I want like aspirational, right? Like, you know, it, it feels like, look, if you perfectly cleaned your own house and you perfectly cleaned all of your energy consumption and you were still like, what more can I do from a sustainability standpoint?

You would be like, Hey, scope three, let’s go searching in my supply chain, right? Like, so I don’t know.

Sheldon Young
Yeah. No, honestly though, it almost works the other way around.

Jason Moreau
Oh really? Okay.

Sheldon Young
Well, again, I’m paying with a very broad brush. Let’s just make that clear with all the statements I’ve made just now. I’m painting with a very broad brush and generalizing for the simplicity point.

Jason Moreau
Sure. Devil’s in the details.

Sheldon Young
Devil’s always in the details. Correct. A lot of people will, will focus on scope three even more because it’s so much bigger.

Jason Moreau
Hmm.

Sheldon Young
They see the potential there. Like some people can, you could completely eliminate your scope one and you’ve touched a fraction of your, of your emissions. A lot of them have made big, bold statements.

A lot of companies made big, bold statements about cutting their emissions period. Right. You’ll often see it broken down into the different scopes and that’s how they go after.

But the big, the big opportunity is scope three for most, for most companies.

Jason Moreau
Can I just like play the contrarian here for a second?

Sheldon Young
You’re, you’re so good at it, Jason.

Jason Moreau
Go for it. Um.

Sheldon Young
And I’m saying they don’t focus on one and two. They do.

Jason Moreau
But I could, not that I would ever do that. But like, you know, if a company is taking care of their own house in terms of, uh, you know how they’re sustainably building things, the energy it takes to do all of those things, scope three feels a bit like I’m going to tell somebody else what they should be doing.

Sheldon Young
Fair, fair.

Jason Moreau
Now to be like, if I’m Walmart, I have a very, very outsized influence on the supply chain. And if that’s a value of mine, then I’m, that’s certainly one of the things I can lean on my supply chain to improve just the way that I would ask them to improve price or quality or anything else. Yep.

But also it does feel like, isn’t that your problem? Uh, X, Y, Z company, we took care of our stuff. You take care of your stuff.

Sheldon Young
Yeah, right. Like, yeah, yeah, no, no, you’re not wrong. I mean, and like I say, most companies will look at all the scopes.

They are ignoring scope one, but I’m saying scope three just gets a lot of attention because it’s so big.

Jason Moreau
Yeah.

Sheldon Young
Right. That’s why you see a lot of attention around regenerative agriculture and things like that. And why, you know, when I talked about it in the, in the climate week episode, you know, sometimes farmers feel that squeeze because they have the biggest impact potentially.

And, you know, a big change for them or, or, you know, just small changes for them can be big impact for, um, their downstream customers.

Jason Moreau
So is it a simple way of saying it? Like the further up the value, the, the, the chain you are closer to the start, the more downstream impact that can have on scope three.

Sheldon Young
I want to be careful to say that.

Jason Moreau
Okay.

Sheldon Young
It just depends. Let’s say a company that uses a lot of, say, steel. Okay.

I would posit that the production of that steel, including the digging of the ore and all the things that go, all the things that go into, into creating steel is a big chunk of, if you’re making a steel product, your most, your emissions are not in making the product. It’s in the steel production. Right.

Okay. Your production. Um, but that’s in that case, it’s, you know, in, in a lot of the scope discussions happen with big companies that have big impact and resources that are focused on sustainability and carving it down.

Smaller companies that don’t have that capability, like they’re still measuring it in some regards, maybe not as thoroughly as say a larger company, it’s more mature.

Jason Moreau
Yeah.

Sheldon Young
And so, you know, their ability to influence and focus on it is different than say a large company that’s, that has, you know, 20,000, 50,000, a hundred thousand people working for it and huge, huge amounts of production. They have a big impact and the expectation is that they focus on lowering emissions. Yeah.

Right. Well, guess what? Scope three is the big nut.

And so a lot of attention gets more. So again, I don’t want to say that people don’t focus. They focus on all of it, but the amount of opportunity exists largely in scope three.

So, all right. So we, we’ve beaten, we’ve beaten that one up enough.

Jason Moreau
Yeah.

Sheldon Young
But I think it’s, it’s a good, it’s a good, thank you for asking the question because again, I think it’s important people understand it a little bit. And I will put my little asterisk next to this whole conversation. Again, I am painting with very broad brushes here.

Right. You know, everyone’s story is different, but you know, when you talk to anyone, scope three is definitely the largest of the bunch. All right.

Now scope four, scope four is a kind of a different little nut. It’s not really talked about a lot. You often don’t even see it in like, well, you don’t see it in like reports because it’s not a formalized thing.

And it’s a little rogue. It’s a little rogue. It’s a little rogue.

No, but it’s an interesting one. It’s not officially or the greenhouse gas protocol, but it’s being discussed more and more. It’s the emissions avoided.

And I’m still trying to understand that completely myself. The emissions avoided through product, product innovation and efficiency. But it’s, it’s where you help others avoid emissions.

So let’s say, I don’t know. I have, I make blow torches. I don’t know, man, make it took me that up.

I make blow torches and those blue torches use propane or another gas, right? Okay, great. It’s now let’s say I invent a blow torch that takes the sun and harnesses that power with just as much power as a gas torch.

a blowtorch. I’ve helped them avoid emissions by putting something there that does not utilize a fossil fuel. If I prevent, let’s say, you could argue that something like this program we’re using right now to podcast together.

You’re sitting in another part of the city than I am. In the old days, you used to have to get together to do things like that if you wanted to have a conversation like this and record it. This is preventing me from having to drive to a location to do that with you.

So the emissions avoided by me having to transport myself to you is the savings. That’s a scope for emission.

Jason Moreau
But is it scope for you or is it scope for the podcasting program?

Sheldon Young
Yeah. So scope for reduction.

Jason Moreau
The person who buys the blowtorch or the company that invented the blowtorch, who claims it in scope for?

Sheldon Young
Yeah. The scope for reduction is credited to the one that innovates, not the one that benefits.

Jason Moreau
Okay.

Sheldon Young
So technically, that’s it. Now, again, I’m putting it out there because it’s talked about. It kind of messes with the whole accounting thing.

I’m not sure how it works completely with that. I’ll tell you, I wrote down a little example because I had to kind of try to figure this out. So a company creates a packaging that eliminates styrofoam.

Let’s say that’s the scenario. Okay. The packaging company gets scope for credit and the user would get scope three impact reduction.

So that’s how that would kind of work. So how do you make sustainability real with this one? Basically, go and innovate emission-reducing technology.

That is the answer to that one.

Jason Moreau
Yeah. Which I would think would be the goal all along for most. But yeah, this is an interesting one.

It’s claiming value for the thing that didn’t happen. You didn’t buy.

Sheldon Young
You helped people avoid. Yes.

Jason Moreau
Yeah. Which is a really interesting way to frame it, quite honestly.

Sheldon Young
Yeah. But I think you have to think about it in terms of the end result of the thing being produced or whatever is the same, but the resource impact was mitigated. Right?

Yeah. And again, I’m probably greatly simplifying it. If you eliminate the need for a product altogether, I don’t know.

Let’s say, I’m just trying to think about that. I don’t know. Yeah.

I don’t want to overthink it.

Jason Moreau
Yeah.

Sheldon Young
In general, that’s how it goes. But again, those are the four scopes. Now, I hope I didn’t confuse the world too much in this.

Again, scope one, that’s right in your control. It’s in your hands. Scope two, that’s the electricity you use.

Scope three, that’s everything outside of your walls, upstream and downstream. And scope four is helping somebody avoid the use and creation of emissions through innovation. Okay?

In a nutshell.

Jason Moreau
Now- Climate math is hard, Sheldon.

Sheldon Young
Climate math is hard. That’s why such smart people are doing it, Jason. Glad they’re doing it.

I’m just helping them. I’m not really doing it. No.

Again, our team, I always get in awe when I listen to our sustainability team leadership talk about how they’re looking at it, the emissions calculations they’re doing, and all the things that they do to keep us compliant. We’re a European company, so they have different compliant rules when it comes to emissions and things like that. So smart people doing great things.

For sure. For sure. Okay, Jason, now’s your time to shine.

I’ve exhausted myself explaining the four scopes. Hopefully, if anyone has questions, reach out to us at no4prints.podcasts at alphalabal.com. I’m happy to try and clear it up more.

I’m sure Google can probably do a better job than I did. But all right, question for you. A lot of people don’t know or have a great grasp of the emission scopes.

We tried to do a little podcast here to help it out. How could marketing tactics be used to create more clarity? What would you do if you had to take what I just kind of taught to you and make it clearer for someone?

What are some tools and mechanisms? This is where the rubber meets the road, buddy. Wow.

Jason Moreau
Yeah. I think you employed one of my favorite ones, which is analogy. You said, I’m a bakery, I get an oven, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I usually try to… I do the test of, can I explain it so my mom understands it or my grandma understands it? In which case, maybe I would use the business, but I also try to just use it more personal.

I would basically be scope one is you making decisions for yourself. Scope two is you having to negotiate with the electric company about how they get the price.

Sheldon Young
You can check a box on your thing to get green energy. Yeah.

Jason Moreau
Yeah, exactly. Or electricity. Yeah.

Yeah. Scope three is you going to the supermarket and saying, hey, how come you don’t organize the shelves by how sustainable these products are?

Sheldon Young
Or just making a choice to buy from a more sustainable source.

Jason Moreau
True. But then my mom would be like, but how do I know which one?

Sheldon Young
Fair point.

Jason Moreau
Help me make better decisions. Yep. Wow.

Then the scope four, I guess, would basically be you telling your neighbor to buy an electric leaf blower instead of a gas-powered leaf blower.

Sheldon Young
Or creating an electric leaf blower for them. And you’ve innovated.

Jason Moreau
Dude, you haven’t met my mom. That’s not in your skill.

Sheldon Young
It’s okay.

Jason Moreau
No. Analogies are great. I honestly, it’s interesting, the whole label conversation.

My brain goes to, is there a way to essentially… On packaged food, we have ingredients. We have calorie count.

It’s really interesting to imagine if companies needed to have some type of an accounting of how much sustainable energy was used to produce and ship the product on average versus fossil fuels or something like that. It’s really hard as a consumer to make good purchase decisions at the point of purchase. So any type of messaging or communication around that is super helpful.

And then I think, I don’t know. I think you need to keep… The one thing I could tell you from a marketing standpoint, you can’t just say it once.

Repetition, repetition, repetition. So this conversation…

Sheldon Young
What about simplifying the message? For me, it could be a complicated topic. If you didn’t know anything about the scopes and just listened to this podcast, I could see it being a little bit of a head scratcher for a while.

I mean, hopefully we did an okay job and read a couple of notes down. But if I wanted to… If I had to tell 50 people right now in a simple way, what could I create to help me do that?

Jason Moreau
Yeah. Well, I think one and two are pretty straightforward. I think three and four, at least to my brain, get a little wonky.

And I appreciate the dialogue around three, because I get what you’re saying, where that’s the biggest opportunity. But that’s also the part that just, from an accounting standpoint, seemingly gets really challenging. It does.

Yeah. So in terms of communicating it… Yeah.

I feel like… I feel like the scope one and two, you basically… And I see this a lot with greenhouse emissions.

It’s the equivalent of this much cars on the road. And it’s like… But I still feel like those are helpful, but they still don’t quite…

Because it’s like…

Sheldon Young
It doesn’t explain the where.

Jason Moreau
Can my brain picture 30,000 cars on the road for a year? You know what I mean?

Sheldon Young
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jason Moreau
I don’t know. I know you teased and promised everybody that I would have the answer, but I think a lot of people have been thinking about this for decades. And I don’t know that they’ve come up with the nice, like, hey, it’s the equivalent of this.

Yeah.

Sheldon Young
I think when I’ve seen it explained, I’ve often seen something like infographics or something that kind of shows a factory or something, right? I know I have a slide I use that’s like a factory that shows one, two, three, doesn’t talk about four, but things like that, I think I’ve seen from an individual perspective, I don’t know, I would imagine emotional connections somehow, like making it real for them. That’s one.

Jason Moreau
I think it’s an issue of scale too, right? I just came across this recently, so I didn’t have time to check the math, but I think it maths. If you were to count a million, like one every second, it would basically take you something like 11 days.

If you were to count to a billion, same one every second, it takes 30 years. But we kind of talk about million and billion like they’re right next to each other. It’s a magnitude.

So I feel like that type of, oh, there needs to be that something that unlocks it for somebody where it’s like, oh, that’s huge. And especially when I imagine as a company, you’re balancing concerns, you’re deciding where you want to start and it’s like, oh, scope three, that’s massive, right? And you understand the scale of what could be reclaimed, but then you’re looking at, but that’s really complicated and maybe there’s a smaller win here that takes less time, right?

So like, I don’t know. It’s a fascinating question that I really don’t have a good answer to, but I don’t feel too bad because I feel like a lot of smart people have thought about this for a while and haven’t come up with like, oh, that’s the thing that really clicks for everybody.

Sheldon Young
Yeah, for sure. For sure. For sure.

Again, I hope today we’ve at least given some people a little bit of way to think about the different scopes and understand a little bit. Someone says scope three, they know what they’re talking about. Oh, you mean something that’s not internal directly in your walls kind of thing.

Jason Moreau
Yeah.

Sheldon Young
And so, yeah, hopefully we can help that at least a little bit and the story can be told in a way that doesn’t have to be a complicated one. It can be pretty straightforward. Yep.

Okay. So wrap it up. Let’s wrap this puppy up, Jason.

Calls to action. Again, we just talked about the four scopes. I’m not going to say them again, but really it’s just a way to map and categorize our impact, right?

Understanding that, you know, we can make better choices. We can understand the levers. We can understand the magnitudes, as you mentioned, of each of the lever moves.

Like if we eliminate all of our scope one, great, congratulations, but there’s still a lot of scope three that’s going to be on your balance sheet for emissions in many, many cases, right? In terms of that marketing communication stuff, right, I think you gave a few interesting ideas that people can talk about when they want to tell that story. How do you simplify it?

How do you break it into something that’s understandable for someone that is maybe not in the technical space or dealing with it every day? Finding those ways to tell the story in a simplified way is going to always help and help people understand what you’re working on. And then I encourage people to go and look at your own company’s sustainability reports or pick a company you respect.

Typically larger ones will have some kind of sustainability report. It may be part of their annual report. So just go and look and dive in.

They’re often well-explained in there as well, and they’ll talk about the initiatives and impact that they make. So if you really wanted to go and learn more, dive into those. Alfa Laval, if you want to go look at ours, we have a really good accounting and understanding of our scopes, at least for the level that they need to be for our report, and hopefully it’ll give you some insight as to how to think about it.

Go do that. And then you can always reach out to one of us. I’ll do my best to help.

No, I’ll do my best to help a listener. No, no, no. You said us, and I think everybody knows who they should actually ask questions about scope emissions to.

Again, full disclosure, I am not a person that works with those things every day. I don’t do the sustainability accounting. I don’t do the sustainability reports or anything like that.

You’re walking into someone that knows a little bit about it and can talk you through the basics, and I’m happy to do that for a listener, at least until a listener base grows to many thousands of people, then you’re on your own.

Jason Moreau
Get in while you can.

Sheldon Young
Get in while you can. This is an early offer here, due to expire at any time. But always inviting feedback in terms of the episode and what we could have explained better.

If you have a great way of thinking about scopes one, two, three, four, please let us know. I’ll happily and gladly share it on the air. On the air, God, sounds like a radio show.

On the podcast. Anything we can do to help people with telling stories around sustainability is why we’re here.

Jason Moreau
Yeah. I would say bonus points if people can explain scope one, two, three, four, based on a popular TV show. Because I went down that road of explain it like it’s Game of Thrones, explain it like it’s Breaking Bad.

I got pretty far, but I’m like, I’m not doing it on the show, but I’m curious if anybody wants to take a stab. I would love to read it.

Sheldon Young
For sure. For sure. All right.

And with that, I guess, well, thank you all for joining us on this episode of No Footprints. We’d love to hear your thoughts, ideas, if you have ideas for topics or a great guest that’s making sustainability real, have her reach out to us at nofootprints.podcasts@alfalaval.com. And with that, Jason, thank you for bearing with me and listening to all the scopes and having a good time with me again.

I always look forward to the times we talk.

Jason Moreau
Absolutely. Great topic. Thank you.

You’ve got it.

Sheldon Young
Our guests come from many industries and companies as we’re talking about how the world makes sustainability real. Our company, Alfa Laval, is a global supplier of process solutions. So it’s very possible that the organizations our guests are with may use Alfa Laval or even our competitors’ products.

This does not mean that we, the hosts or Alfa Laval, are endorsing any of the company’s guests or the specific ideas that we discuss.