Scope 1 and 2 are the two emissions categories that are specifically requested in the VSME standard. For a construction company, this comes down to two types of figures: the fuel you consume yourself in your own equipment and company vehicles (scope 1), and the electricity and gas you purchase for your office, workshop and site cabin (scope 2). Both can be traced back to documents you likely already have.
What often causes confusion is material use and transport by others. The emissions embedded in cement, steel or concrete that you purchase, and transport that a supplier arranges for you, fall under scope 3. This is a third category, which for a supplier with a thousand employees or fewer is rarely separately requested in practice. For this article we focus on scope 1 and 2: the figures you have in-house.
Scope 1: fuel you consume yourself
Scope 1 includes all fuel burned by equipment and vehicles that you own or regularly hire. Think of diesel for cranes, shovels and generators on the construction site, and petrol or diesel for company vehicles and vans. The source for this is usually straightforward: fuel receipts, fuel card statements or an annual summary from the leasing company. What matters is that you track the amount in litres, not euros; the price per litre varies, but the quantity of fuel is what counts for the calculation.
If you have your own equipment with a separate fuel tank on the construction site, the consumption from that tank also counts. A statement from the fuel tank supplier is just as useful for scope 1 as a fuel card.
Scope 2: energy you purchase
Scope 2 covers the electricity and gas you obtain from your energy supplier for your office, workshop and any permanent site cabin with its own connection. The energy bill is the source for this; it shows consumption in kilowatt-hours and cubic metres, which is exactly what you need. A temporary site cabin that runs on your client's grid usually does not fall under your own scope 2, because you do not purchase that consumption yourself.
A question that often comes up: does self-generated solar power count, and what about purchased green power? This is a separate point within scope 2, with its own calculation method. the overview of all topics, sorted by your situation covers that specifically.
Material use and transport: where does that belong?
If you transport material to the construction site yourself in your own truck, that journey falls under scope 1: it is your own vehicle and your own fuel. If you hire a transport company or have the supplier deliver the material themselves, that journey falls under scope 3, as does the emissions already embedded in the material before it arrives with you. This distinction is not academic: it determines which figure belongs in which category, and therefore also what a client can actually request according to the VSME baseline.
What a client specifically asks for
A questionnaire from a client usually mentions scope 1 and 2 using exactly those terms, sometimes broken down by fuel type. If you do not immediately recognise this structure in the question itself, it helps to reason backwards from the source: if there is something about fuel consumption or the vehicle fleet, it is almost always about scope 1; if there is something about energy consumption of the premises, it is about scope 2. If you are unsure whether a specific question falls within the VSME baseline or beyond it, that is precisely where the line between what may and may not be asked lies.
Converting liters and kilowatt-hours into a CO2 figure requires an emission factor with a fixed reference date; this factor does not change per company but does change per year of publication. Once you have established that, it is mainly a matter of submitting the same receipts and invoices each quarter or year. how the file is built from your own documents shows how that works in practice, without you having to figure out again which figure belongs to which category.
If you have questions about what counts as fuel or energy figures, or about how a specific trip or invoice should be classified, that is precisely the kind of question that comes up regularly. answers to frequently asked questions about the questionnaire addresses the most common cases of uncertainty.
Would you like to quickly see which figures are relevant for your company before you dive into the receipts folder? in five questions see where you stand provides a first direction without obligation.