The same tea exporter inventory, restated under ISO 14064-1:2018. Six categories instead of three scopes, gas-level disaggregation of direct emissions, a declared GHG stock liability, and formally disclosed exclusions. A companion deliverable that answers a different question for a different reader — and a demonstration of what actually changes when the framework changes.
The client needed both. Export customers and their sustainability teams speak in Scope 1, 2 and 3. Certification bodies, ISO-aligned tender processes and some European buyers ask specifically for ISO 14064-1 conformance. Rather than choose, we built one activity dataset and issued two reports from it.
The exercise is not cosmetic relabelling. ISO 14064-1:2018 organises indirect emissions by the nature of the activity rather than by position in the value chain, requires a formal declaration of significance for included and excluded sources, asks for direct emissions to be reported by gas where source data allow, and requires disclosure of GHG stocks held on site whose accidental release would create a material emissions event. None of those last three appear in a standard GHG Protocol report.
The gross total is unchanged at 7,953.73 tCO₂e, because it is the same underlying data measured the same way. What changes is how the total decomposes, and consequently what a reader notices first.
ISO 14064-1 splits what the GHG Protocol calls Scope 3 across four categories, grouped by activity type rather than by upstream or downstream position.
| ISO 14064-1:2018 category | GHG Protocol equivalent | tCO₂e | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Category 1 — direct emissions | Scope 1 | 21.24 | 0.3% |
| Category 2 — indirect from imported energy | Scope 2 (location-based) | 298.21 | 3.7% |
| Category 3 — indirect from transportation | Scope 3.4, 3.7, 3.9 | 1,112.64 | 14.0% |
| Category 4 — indirect from products used by the organisation | Scope 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.5 | 3,704.06 | 46.6% |
| Category 5 — indirect from use of the organisation's products | Scope 3.11, 3.12 | 2,817.58 | 35.4% |
| Category 6 — indirect from other sources | Scope 3.6 | 0.00 | — |
| Total direct emissions | Scope 1 | 21.24 | 0.3% |
| Total indirect emissions | Scope 2 + 3 | 7,932.49 | 99.7% |
| Total gross emissions | — | 7,953.73 | 100.0% |
| Removals and purchased reductions | — | 0.00 | — |
| Total net emissions | — | 7,953.73 | 100.0% |
Under the GHG Protocol, transport is scattered across three separate Scope 3 categories — upstream distribution at 401.81, downstream distribution at 467.76, and employee commuting at 174.22 — none of which individually looks like a priority next to purchased goods. ISO 14064-1 consolidates them into a single Category 3 at 1,112.64 tCO₂e, which is 14% of the footprint and the third-largest line in the inventory.
Same emissions, same data, materially different impression. For an organisation deciding where to spend a limited decarbonisation budget, a consolidated freight-and-mobility figure is a more actionable unit than three fragments, because it maps to a single set of logistics and transport-partner decisions.
The consolidated transport figure broken back down by source. Road freight of finished goods and inbound materials dominates; sea freight, despite covering far longer distances, is a small fraction of it.
Road freight across all three flows totals 723.08 tCO₂e — 65% of Category 3 — against 146.49 tCO₂e for all sea freight combined. That ratio is the practical argument for scrutinising domestic trucking before questioning export shipping, and it is far easier to see in this framing than in the scopes view.
ISO 14064-1 asks for direct emissions disaggregated by gas where source data allow. Doing so shows that a total of 21.24 tCO₂e is not a single-gas problem.
| Source | CO₂ (kg) | CH₄ (kg) | N₂O (kg) | HFC-32 (kg CO₂e) | Total (kg CO₂e) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Diesel generator — Site 1 | 10,090.2 | 1.94 | — | — | 10,160.4 |
| Diesel generator — Site 2 | 9,732.6 | 1.87 | — | — | 9,798.3 |
| LPG (canisters) | 437.2 | 0.13 | — | — | 440.0 |
| Motorbike, 100cc (petrol) | 277.3 | 0.12 | 0.35 | — | 392.1 |
| Air-conditioning — HFC-32 leakage | — | — | — | 450.2 | 450.2 |
| Total Category 1 | 20,537.3 | 4.06 | 0.35 | 450.2 | 21,241.0 |
Refrigerant leakage is 2.1% of direct emissions from 0.45 tCO₂e of HFC-32, against 20.5 tonnes of CO₂ from fuel combustion. In carbon-dioxide-equivalent terms it is a rounding error. In risk terms it is not, which is what the next section addresses.
ISO 14064-1 requires disclosure of greenhouse gases held on site whose accidental release would materially increase emissions for the period. For this organisation that is the installed refrigerant charge.
| Stock held | Quantity | Unit | Potential liability (tCO₂e) |
|---|---|---|---|
| HFC-32 (R-32) — installed charge, air-conditioning units | 33.25 | tCO₂e equivalent charge | 33.25 |
The reported annual leakage from these units is 0.45 tCO₂e, derived from a 2% default rate. The total installed charge is 33.25 tCO₂e — seventy-four times the annual reported figure, and more than the organisation's entire Category 1 direct emissions of 21.24 tCO₂e.
Because the charge is distributed across many small split units rather than held in one vessel, no single failure releases the whole bank. The exposure is cumulative instead: a servicing regime that vents rather than recovers refrigerant, or an unmanaged end-of-life replacement programme across the fleet, would release it in increments that never individually look material yet together exceed everything the generators, vehicles and gas canisters emit in a year. A GHG Protocol report would never surface that, because a stock is not an emission until it is released. Making it visible turned refrigerant recovery at service and decommissioning from an afterthought into a named operational control.
Both standards keep biogenic CO₂ out of the headline total and both require it to be disclosed separately. ISO 14064-1 is the more explicit of the two about how, which is one of the practical reasons for issuing this second report.
The underlying logic is the same in either framework. The carbon in tea leaves was taken from the atmosphere by the plant in the growing cycle just before harvest, so returning it through composting, combustion or aerobic decomposition closes a short biological loop rather than adding fossil carbon to the system. ISO 14064-1:2018 requires biogenic CO₂ emissions and removals to be quantified and reported separately from the six categories, rather than folded into the gross total or left out.
That separation is why the gross figure of 7,953.73 tCO₂e is identical in both reports. It is also why Category 5 shows 194.62 tCO₂e for packaging incineration but 0.00 tCO₂e for incineration of the product residue itself: the packaging line is fossil-derived film and laminate, while the tea is biomass and belongs on the separate biogenic disclosure.
Where ISO adds value is in the discipline it imposes around that disclosure. Because the standard also requires each source to carry a declared significance judgement, a biogenic stream cannot simply be dropped as immaterial without a stated reason. Combined with the requirement to report direct emissions by gas, this forces the distinction that matters most: biogenic CO₂ sits outside the categories, but biogenic methane and nitrous oxide do not. Methane carries roughly twenty-eight times the warming effect of CO₂ over a century, so biomass decomposing anaerobically in a landfill is an in-category emission, not a neutral one.
The same three caveats apply as in the GHG Protocol report. Neutrality depends on the biomass being grown on land already in agricultural use, on the decomposition pathway being aerobic or controlled rather than anaerobic, and on the regrowth cycle being short enough that the loop closes within a meaningful timeframe. For an annual crop like tea those conditions are reasonable; for fibre-based packaging they depend on the forestry behind it.
Under the GHG Protocol, the zero entries against product residue and food-waste composting are easy to read as "not measured". ISO 14064-1's requirement for a declared significance judgement against every source forces those lines to say what they actually mean — quantified, biogenic, reported separately — which is precisely the kind of ambiguity a verifier would otherwise raise.
ISO 14064-1 requires exclusions to be declared and justified rather than simply omitted. Five GHG Protocol Scope 3 categories fall outside this organisation's boundary, and each has a stated reason.
The distinction between "not applicable", "excluded" and "immaterial" is a formality that earns its place. A reader who sees a blank against Investments cannot tell whether the organisation has no portfolio, has one it chose not to measure, or forgot. Declaring which of the three applies is the difference between a report that can be verified and one that cannot.
Confidentiality note. This case study is drawn from a real consulting engagement. All organisation-identifying information has been removed or generalised, and every activity-data and emissions value has been uniformly scaled relative to the underlying client inventory. Emission factors quoted are genuine published factors and have not been altered. Figures are presented to illustrate report structure, method and findings, and are not a factual representation of any named organisation's emissions.
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