Scope 1, 2 and 3: what is a customer actually asking for?
When a customer, bank or insurer asks about your emissions across scope 1, 2 and 3, they are referring to three different sources of the same pollution. Scope 1 is what you burn yourself: fuel in company vehicles, gas for heating. Scope 2 is the electricity and heat you purchase from an energy supplier. Scope 3 is everything around that: from the raw materials your suppliers produce to your employees' commuting.
For most SME businesses, scope 1 and 2 can be filled in using existing documents: the energy bill and fuel receipts. Scope 3 is the category where questionnaires sometimes go too far, and precisely this category often falls outside what the VSME standard requires for smaller suppliers. Below you will read what each scope means in concrete terms and where you can find the figures.
Scope 1: the fuel you burn yourself
Scope 1 counts emissions from everything burned within your own business. Think of company vehicles on the road, a forklift running on diesel, or the boiler in your building. The source is usually straightforward: fuel receipts, fuel card statements from the leasing company, or gas meter readings on the energy bill. A litre of diesel or a cubic metre of gas is converted to CO2 equivalent using a fixed emission factor; this factor is not fixed forever, but is reviewed periodically with a reference date.
For an installation company with a fleet of vehicles, this is usually the largest item within scope 1. For an office organisation without its own vehicles, scope 1 can be almost zero, and that is a valid answer — a questionnaire asks for a figure, not a minimum.
Scope 2: the electricity and heat you purchase
Scope 2 covers energy you do not generate yourself but purchase: electricity from the grid, and sometimes district heating. The source for this is your energy supplier's annual invoice, which shows consumption in kWh. Here too, an emission factor applies, and this varies depending on whether you purchase conventional electricity or have a supply contract with guarantees of origin — this distinction makes more difference to the outcome than most business owners expect.
Together, scope 1 and 2 cover for an average SME business the largest part of what a questionnaire asks for within the VSME standard. Both categories can be reconstructed from documents already in your administration, which mainly means: no new measurement needed, but gathering and correctly converting existing figures.
Scope 3: the chain around it, and why it often remains out of view
Scope 3 encompasses emissions throughout the value chain: production of raw materials by your suppliers, transport not carried out by yourself, use of your product by the customer, and your employees' commuting. This is by far the broadest and most labour-intensive category, and also the category where debate exists: a large customer often does need scope 3 for their own reporting, and therefore tries to pass that question on to suppliers.
Since March 2026, there has been a limit attached to this: a reporting-obligated company may not demand more sustainability information from a supplier with a thousand employees or fewer than what is contained in the VSME standard. A full scope 3 inventory generally goes far beyond that. Whether a specific question falls within or outside that limit depends on the exact wording and on whether your business falls within the exemption — this is something to assess per question, not in general terms.
What if the questionnaire still asks for scope 3?
If you receive a question about scope 3 that goes further than what you can reasonably substantiate, the first thing to do is assess that question against the standard before you start calculating. determined per situation what may and may not be asked provides a starting point for this. Often it turns out that part of the question falls within scope 1 or 2 and can be answered with existing documents, while the scope 3 part can be refuted or narrowed down in relation to the customer.
From figures to answers
The work does not lie in the theory behind scope 1, 2 and 3, but in gathering the right documents and recording them correctly once. At esgia.eu you confirm yourself what is read from your energy bill and fuel receipts, and that file remains available for the next questionnaire. If you first want to see where your company stands, take the free quick scan in a few questions, or see how the data is processed via an explanation of the approach.