What’s new
Waste emissions (Scope 3, Category 5) are now broken down into two independent components: management emissions (waste treatment and processing) and transport emissions (hauling to the treatment facility). Previously these emissions were presented as a single figure, making it harder to understand where each part of the impact came from and how to act on it.
With this breakdown you can pinpoint exactly how much CO2 equivalent comes from treating the waste and how much from transporting it to the management plant. This information appears across every surface in the platform where waste data is displayed: pivot tables, consolidated reports, carbon footprint invoices, and Excel downloads.
How it works
The transport calculation is performed automatically using the distance to the treatment center, the waste quantity, and the road freight emission factor. You do not need to configure anything extra: if your waste records already include the distance to the treatment center, the breakdown appears automatically.
In downloadable Excel reports you will find two new columns: “CO2 eq management (kg)” and “CO2 eq transport (kg)”. The sum of both always matches the total waste emissions, so your historical data remains unchanged.
For organizations with data predating this update, your administrator can run a recalculation that applies the breakdown retroactively without modifying previously reported totals.
SBTi reporting compatibility
One of the key advantages of this breakdown is the ability to independently configure whether waste transport is included in your GHG Protocol reports. If your organization follows the SBTi “Beyond the Boundary” approach, you can now exclude waste transport emissions from your Scope 3 reporting while keeping management emissions. This is configured from the project settings panel, where you will find waste transport as a standalone data category that you can toggle on or off according to your reporting needs.
Pivot tables continue to group both components under the waste category for visual consistency, but the detailed data is always available in consolidated views and downloads.