A full Scope 1, 2 and 3 greenhouse gas inventory for a tea blending and packaging operation in South India, exporting finished tea bags worldwide. Prepared under the GHG Protocol Corporate Standard and the Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Standard, with dual-reported Scope 2, all fifteen Scope 3 categories screened, an indicative decarbonisation pathway to 2045, and a product carbon footprint for a single cup of tea.
The organisation needed a complete, standard-aligned inventory it could put in front of export customers and lenders, and a clear view of which emission sources were material enough to act on. Two sites, one legal entity, one reporting year.
The distribution is the single most important finding. Direct operations account for a third of one percent of the footprint; purchased electricity for under four percent. Everything else — 96% — happens in the value chain, upstream of the sites or downstream in the hands of freight operators and consumers.
| Metric | tCO₂e | Share of total |
|---|---|---|
| Scope 1 — direct emissions | 21.24 | 0.3% |
| Scope 2 — location-based | 298.21 | 3.7% |
| Scope 2 — market-based | 436.82 | — |
| Scope 3 — value chain emissions | 7,634.27 | 96.0% |
| Total (Scope 1 + 2 location-based + 3) | 7,953.73 | 100.0% |
| Total (Scope 1 + 2 market-based + 3) | 8,092.33 | — |
Diesel generators dominate a small total. Both sites run generators against grid interruption, and that single source accounts for 94% of everything the organisation emits directly.
Fugitive refrigerant emissions were estimated by applying a default 2% annual leakage rate to the total installed HFC-32 charge across split and centralised air-conditioning units, in the absence of unit-specific leak-testing records. That is a defensible screening assumption, but it is an assumption, and it is the one Scope 1 line that could move materially with better records.
With no energy attribute certificates, power purchase agreements or other contractual instruments in place during the period, the market-based figure sits 46% above the location-based one. The gap is itself the finding: it quantifies what green power procurement is currently worth to this organisation.
Every category was screened against magnitude, business relevance, degree of influence, data availability and expected impact relative to Scopes 1 and 2. Ten were quantified. Five are genuinely not applicable to the business model — the organisation leases no assets in either direction, sells a finished consumer product that undergoes no further industrial processing, operates no franchises, and holds no investment portfolio.
Purchased goods and services (3,630.82 tCO₂e) and use of sold products (2,622.95 tCO₂e) together account for 82% of total gross emissions. The first is the tea itself plus packaging materials, calculated from supplier purchase records against life-cycle factors. The second is consumer brewing — the energy customers spend boiling water, estimated from sales volumes and published literature.
These two categories also sit at opposite ends of the influence spectrum. Purchased goods are addressable through sourcing and supplier engagement. Consumer brewing is not directly controllable at all, only influenced through product format and consumer communication. Any credible target has to treat them differently.
Ranked across the whole value chain, ignoring scope boundaries. This is the view that drives action: three sources — tea, brewing and packaging — account for roughly 78% of the total footprint.
An illustrative reduction trajectory across the five material categories, showing 2030 and 2045 targets against the 2024/25 baseline. Not a verified forecast and not an SBTi submission — a planning instrument to show what a credible pathway would need to deliver, and where.
| Category | Baseline | 2030 | 2045 | Principal measures |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scope 1 — direct | 21.3 | 2.5 | 0.0 | Solar-plus-battery microgrids replacing diesel; fleet electrification; low-GWP refrigerants |
| Scope 2 — purchased electricity | 298.8 | 125.0 | 0.0 | Expanded on-site solar PV and storage; green power procurement; efficiency upgrades |
| Scope 3 — transportation | 1,112.5 | 625.0 | 125.0 | Low-carbon logistics, route optimisation, transporter partnerships |
| Scope 3 — purchased goods & services | 3,703.8 | 2,631.3 | 1,500.0 | Sustainable packaging, local sourcing, supplier decarbonisation programme |
| Scope 3 — use of sold products | 2,817.5 | 2,500.0 | 1,250.0 | Low-energy preparation formats, R&D, consumer awareness |
Scopes 1 and 2 reach zero by 2045 in this pathway, and they are the easiest part — together they are under 4% of the footprint and both are technically solved problems. The hard work is the two flat-looking lines at the top. Purchased goods and services falls by 60% and use of sold products by 56%, and neither can be delivered by the organisation acting alone. That is the honest shape of decarbonisation for a business of this kind.
Alongside the organisational inventory, we allocated the footprint down to a single cup. At the reporting period's sales volume and 2.5 g of dry tea per bag, annual output corresponds to roughly 180.9 million cups.
| Life-cycle stage | g CO₂e per cup | Share of cradle-to-shelf |
|---|---|---|
| Raw tea and flavour inputs, packaging manufacture | 20.48 | 69.5% |
| Upstream and downstream transport and distribution | 6.15 | 20.9% |
| Purchased electricity at the sites (Scope 2, allocated) | 1.65 | 5.6% |
| End-of-life treatment of teabag and packaging waste | 1.08 | 3.7% |
| On-site direct emissions (Scope 1, allocated) | 0.12 | 0.4% |
| Subtotal — cradle-to-shelf | 29.47 | 100.0% |
The brewing phase was modelled from first principles rather than taken from a literature factor. Raising 200 mL of water from 25°C to boiling requires 17.4 Wh of thermal energy, delivered at different efficiencies depending on the appliance: an electric kettle at 85%, a pan on an electric hotplate at 70% to reflect heat loss around an open pan, and a pan on an LPG stove at 60%. Electricity was converted at the India grid location-based factor of 0.71 kgCO₂e/kWh; LPG at the same combustion and well-to-tank factors used in the organisational inventory.
LPG is the least thermally efficient of the three appliances modelled, and it still produces the lowest-carbon cup — roughly 16% below the electric kettle. India's grid is carbon-intensive enough that burning gas directly beats converting fuel to electricity, moving it across a grid, and then converting it back to heat. An open pan on an electric hotplate is the worst case, at 21% above the kettle.
Across all scenarios brewing accounts for 16–37% of the total cup footprint, sitting on top of the roughly 29–30 g CO₂e embedded before the cup is ever made. Independently, our first-principles kettle estimate of 14.57 g landed within half a percent of the published literature factor of 14.50 g — which suggests that widely used figure implicitly assumes kettle brewing, and should not be applied to markets where pan boiling is the norm.
Several entries in this inventory are quantified at 0.00 tCO₂e rather than left blank, and the reason is biogenic carbon accounting. It is worth setting out properly, because it is the part of a food and beverage inventory most often misread.
Tea is biomass. The carbon in the leaf was drawn out of the atmosphere by the plant during the growing cycle immediately preceding harvest. When that carbon returns to the atmosphere as CO₂ — through composting, incineration or aerobic decomposition — it closes a short loop that began a season or two earlier, rather than adding carbon that had been locked underground for millions of years. On that basis the GHG Protocol treats biogenic CO₂ from the combustion or decomposition of biomass as outside the three scopes.
Outside the scopes is not the same as ignored. The Corporate Standard requires biogenic CO₂ to be reported separately, as an informational line alongside the inventory, so a reader can see the full carbon flow and so inventories stay comparable between organisations that handle biomass differently. In this inventory the biogenic CO₂ streams are the tea residue itself at end of life, and the fibre-based fraction of packaging sent to composting or combustion.
This is why Category 12 shows 194.62 tCO₂e for end-of-life treatment of sold products. That figure is the fossil-derived packaging — plastic films, laminates and adhesives — being incinerated. The tea leaves inside the bag contribute 0.00 tCO₂e to the scope total, and food waste sent to composting likewise. The emissions are real; they are simply accounted for on a separate line because they are part of a closed biological cycle rather than a net addition to the atmosphere.
Biogenic carbon is only near-neutral under conditions that do not always apply, and a report that presents it as automatically neutral is overstating the case. Three exceptions matter here.
Biogenic carbon is not irrelevant to this business, but it is largely not where the problem sits. The material finding of this inventory is that 82% of the footprint is purchased goods and consumer brewing, and neither is a biogenic question. What biogenic accounting does change is how end-of-life is managed: the difference between tea residue composted and tea residue landfilled is not a difference in how much carbon returns to the atmosphere, but in what form — and methane makes that difference roughly twenty-eight-fold.
Practically, that argues for confirming end-of-life pathways in the main export markets, and for reporting biogenic CO₂ transparently on its own line rather than either burying it in the total or omitting it entirely.
Uncertainty was assessed qualitatively per source, across activity data, emission factor, methodological and temporal-spatial dimensions. Stating it plainly matters more than the precision of any single figure.
| Source group | Rating | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Fuel and electricity consumption (Scope 1 and 2) | Low | Metered or invoiced data, source-specific factors |
| Upstream and downstream transportation | Moderate | Freight distances estimated from purchase and sales bills |
| Purchased goods and services, capital goods | Moderate | Mass-based estimation against secondary life-cycle factors |
| Employee commuting | Moderate | Contractor invoices plus an annual staff survey |
| Use of sold products | High | Assumed consumer behaviour, no organisational visibility |
| End-of-life treatment of sold products | High | Assumed regional waste-treatment mix, no control over pathway |
The two highest-uncertainty categories are also the second and fifth largest by magnitude. That is uncomfortable but unavoidable: consumer brewing and packaging disposal cannot be measured by the reporting organisation, only modelled. It is the reason the cup-level brewing sensitivity above matters — it converts an opaque assumption into a stated, testable range.
Ordered by how much each step reduces uncertainty in the figures that actually drive decisions.
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.
We build GHG Protocol and ISO 14064-1 inventories for organisations of any size, structured verification-ready from the start.
Book a consultation