hi i'm melissa raid chief sustainability officer at sustain.life scopes allow you to identify how much co2 you emit based on everything it takes your business to operate so let's focus on scope one first i want you to think of these as burn scope 1 emissions include all those fuels that you burn directly think of this as the gas and company cars the heating oil or fuel used to power equipment if your company pays the fuel bill directly and owns the asset you have scope 1 emissions so now let's move on to scope 2 which i want you to think of as buy scope 2 emissions are associated with things like purchase electricity steam heating and cooling and these are considered indirect because while your company consumes this energy it's generated off-site somewhere else so you can't directly control it scope 3 emissions are indirect emissions associated with everything else that supports your business operation there are 15 categories of scope 3 emissions unless you own physical assets the majority of your emissions will likely be scope 3 and i have a spoiler alert they're also the most difficult to measure so again a good shorthand for remembering the scopes are the three b's scope 1 burn scope 2 buy and scope 3 beyond so let's bring it all together with an example let's think of something like a t-shirt manufacturer they might start off by measuring the emissions associated with the energy that they use at their factories that they own this would include maybe things like the diesel to power their equipment the electricity to keep everything on the heating oil to keep their workers warm and that's a great start that's their scope one and two but to really understand the full impact of its business operation it needs to look at these more nebulous scope 3 emissions and that includes things that are upstream as well as downstream from the point of sale of those t-shirts so just an example of what that might include some upstream emissions could include the energy that it takes to process the fibers that eventually become the cotton that gets sewn into these t-shirts as well as the transit miles it takes to deliver that raw material to the factory to be sewn into t-shirts those are both upstream scope 3 emissions a downstream scope 3 emission could be at the end of life of those t-shirts as it decomposes in a landfill the emissions that come from that process and that's just a sampling of what it could look like so i know that that's a lot to take in and it might seem overwhelming but it gets easier the more familiar you are with this emissions accounting framework and if you want to take a lot of the guesswork out of calculating these emissions identifying what's a relevant source for your business i have great news the sustain.life missions management platform helps put into practice everything we've learned in this video so i invite you all to come check it out on sustain.life and thanks for tuning in