During 2021, our Procurement teams developed data collecting systems that started identifying absolute CO2-eq emissions by broad stroke ingredient category.
97% of Nutreco’s GHG emissions come from our purchased goods, making this a key area of attention as we work to reduce our footprint. At the same time, this is the most challenging aspect of our footprint reduction journey, as we have a mostly indirect influence on our upstream emissions.
Addressing Nutreco’s scope 3 emissions is a supply chain challenge that will require a lot of time and effort, both in terms of aligning with our suppliers and customers, but also ensuring that our own data is accurate and in line with prevailing standards. In the coming years, these efforts will be a key attention point for the Procurement team.
SBTi accepted and published Nutreco’s scope 3 reduction targets in February 2021. The subsequent months were dedicated to confirming the mapping exercise of Nutreco’s scope 3 emissions to ascertain our 2018 baseline year emissions and 2020 emissions. During this mapping exercise, we built a dashboard linking our procurement data to the emission factors – providing our businesses and procurement departments with real-time insight into their scope 3 emissions.
We are now in the second phase of the dashboard’s construction, during which we are determining the primary data for major ingredients and internally verifying data accuracy.
A key challenge in the operationalisation of the dashboard and our baseline calculations is the lack of country-of-origin data in our procurement systems. Even though country-of-origin is known for many ingredients, it is not yet automatically tracked in the procurement system. This means that for most ingredients, global average emission factors are currently used to calculate the carbon footprint.
Especially for crop-based ingredients, emission factors can vary significantly (depending on which country the ingredient is sourced from), which adds considerable uncertainty. For example, soy cultivated in the United States has a much lower average carbon footprint than soy cultivated in Brazil (as do different regions within Brazil). Furthermore, soy’s complex value chain adds additional challenges to accurately “footprinting” this commodity ingredient. When traded on international markets, soy from several different countries may be mixed and blended together by the time the product reaches major markets. As a result, the sourcing of ingredients from other regions as a scope 3 reduction strategy currently does not impact the calculated footprint given by the dashboard. Tackling this challenge will be a priority in 2022.
During 2021, our Procurement teams developed data collecting systems that started identifying absolute CO2-eq emissions by broad stroke ingredient category (scope 3) as reported in the next table. The ambition is to start reporting our GHG emissions for scope 3next year after finalising the second phase of the dashboard and data validation.
What we can see from this table is that the vegetable ingredients are a key contributor to our scope 3 emissions. Within this category, our soy and palm procurement are driving the impact. Our deforestation-free policy should drive this impact down, as the carbon footprint related to land use change makes a significant contribution to vegetables’ footprints.
We have started to request footprint data from novel ingredients suppliers in order to identify those that are most promising in terms of having a lower footprint. We are also engaging with our highest impact suppliers to discuss SBTI commitment and footprint data. We will accelerate this work in 2022.