Case Study B: Including Emissions That Matter: IKEA and DHL Express Nordic Count Their Core Business Scope 3 Emissions

Including relevant scope 3 emissions in a GHG inventory ensures that it is complete and may provide companies with innovative opportunities to reduce emissions. IKEA and DHL Express Nordic are good examples. (1)

IKEA is a global home furnishings retailer with more than 160 stores in over 33 countries. When gathering data for its GHG inventory, IKEA included scope 3 emissions from its customers’ trips to and from its stores because it perceived this activity as important to its business and expected these emissions to be large relative to its scope 1 and scope 2 emissions. IKEA’s GHG inventory did confirm that this activity was a large source of emissions, accounting for 56 percent of its total emissions. IKEA’s entire scope 3 emissions including customer travel accounted for 82 percent of its total emissions (see table). IKEA also found it could have signifi cant influence over this source of scope 3 emissions when selecting sites for new stores. Consequently, IKEA set and has met its goal of making at least 75 percent of its stores accessible by public transit by locating them closer to cities and transit lines as well as funding transit projects near the stores. IKEA now informs its customers about their travel options by listing online customer ride-sharing, funding bicycle routes to its stores, and establishing park-and-ride bus services and in-store public transit information boards.

DHL Express Nordic, a division of Deutsche Post World Net, is a logistics and package delivery service operating in four Nordic countries. Although the company operates its own fleet of trains, trucks, ships, and planes, most of its deliveries are made by third-party contractors, and the resulting emissions are scope 3 for the company. These services are essential to DHL Nordic’s business and account for 94 percent of its total GHG emissions (see table). To reduce these emissions, DHL Express Nordic collects, through a mandatory survey, information about its contractors’ environmental performance, including activity data such as fuel type, fuel usage, engine class, loading capacity and loading factors. Each contractor’s performance receives a score, and since DHL Nordic Express works with only those contractors receiving scores above a certain number, they have an incentive to improve and maintain their environmental performance.

By including these scope 3 emission sources in their inventories, IKEA and DHL Express Nordic identified their largest sources of GHG emissions and thus were able to modify their operations and to encourage customers and suppliers to try to reduce these emissions.

Note

1. Business Leaders Initiative on Climate Change: Reports 1-4. 2002-2005. Amsterdam and London: Respect Europe.