Delivering a first time scope 1, 2, and 3 GHG inventory

Adam Hall worked with SINAI’s customer success and climate change experts to collect all the required data to develop a first-time GHG inventory. Throughout this process, SINAI identified Adam Hall’s determined boundary conditions, methodology, and emissions factors for the calculations, as well as identified relevant data sources and collection processes for the organization to adopt.

The biggest challenge throughout the inventory development process was collecting data for Adam Hall’s first-time scope 3 inventory. When considering all emissions scopes, scope 3 emissions make up more than 80% of Adam Hall’s emissions, which, according to SBTi, if scope 3 emissions are greater than 40% of total emissions, scope 3 emissions are deemed significant.

To support Adam Hall, SINAI performed a Materiality and Relevance assessment for each scope 3 categories to prioritize the data collection for categories that were expected to have the highest emissions. With a plan and guidance from SINAI, Adam Hall then worked with their finance, procurement, and sales divisions to collect the activity data for the calculations.

At the end of this exercise, Adam Hall had a clear plan of the data that needed to be collected, and the data sources that could be applied to complete the emissions calculations for all categories.

Improving scope 3 calculations

Due to type of data that was readily available, most scope 3 calculations were carried out using spend-based approaches. Because of Adam Hall’s commitment to sustainability, transitioning to more accurate scope 3 emissions calculations is a near term sustainability priority.

To support Adam Hall in their journey, SINAI developed a scope 3 improvement plan to transition spend-based methodologies to average-data calculations, particularly in the categories that had a large impact on the scope 3 inventory. Over the next year the main goal of Adam Hall will be establishing new collection methods to obtain the data needed to transition to average-data calculations. This will set up Adam Hall to eventually begin to engage with suppliers and support decarbonization within their value chain.

Integrating sustainability software into the companies operations

Since this was Adam Hall’s first time performing any sort of GHG inventory calculations, developing these processes in software was critical to provide automatic calculations and reports and reduce the time required from Adam Halls sustainability team.

By having all calculations completed in software, efficiency is obtained as the team repeats the emissions calculations on an annual basis.

This was particularly important for Adam Hall to establish a reputable process prior to German requirements to report emissions in 2025.