Scope 3 Emissions Inventory and Supplier Engagement for Steelcase, Inc.

Abstract

As a leader in corporate sustainability, Steelcase, Inc., a multinational $3.7B office furniture company, is committed to reducing its carbon footprint by setting science-based targets aligned with a 1.5ºC climate scenario as set forth by the Paris Agreement. As such, the objectives of this Master’s Project included the development of a scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions inventory, a set of strategic communications for internal and external stakeholders, and a supplier engagement strategy, each in support of Steelcase setting and achieving a set of scope 3 science-based targets for the decade ahead. Given the distribution of emissions across scope 3 categories, the team focused on three of the most emissions-intensive and thus impactful categories: purchased goods and services (PGS), upstream transportation and distribution (T&D), and waste generated in operations (WGO). For PGS, the team leveraged life cycle assessments for a number of products combined with spendbased emissions factors to estimate emissions for Steelcase’s supplier base. For T&D emissions, the team again used spend-based emissions methods, but included distance and travel type data to calculate a more fine-tuned emissions inventory for T&D suppliers. For WGO, the team calculated scrapped and discarded tonnage amounts from internal sources to determine overall waste, then used emissions factors to determine the equivalent embedded emissions for each material type. Steelcase then used this inventory to launch an ambitious set of climate goals for the next decade: with an overarching goal to achieve carbon negative emissions across operations by 2030, Steelcase also set targets to reduce scope 1 and 2 emissions by 50% by 2030, reduce scope 3 emissions associated with WGO and business travel by 14% each by 2030, and engage with 80% of suppliers by emissions to set their own science-based targets by 2025. To accompany the launch of that set of targets, the team developed a set of strategic communications for both internal and external stakeholders. Then, the team began developing and producing a six-part webinar series to educate and engage Steelcase’s suppliers to develop their own emissions inventories and science-based targets. As Steelcase works towards these goals and continues to establish itself as a leader in corporate sustainability, the team has developed the following recommendations: ● Build on improvements in data management practices by further transitioning from spendbased to supplier-specific methods and developing supportive processes ● Balance the trade-offs between increasing granularity of data with the associated costs ● Bolster the scrap tracking initiative and implement strategies to minimize waste-to-landfill ● Facilitate understanding and engagement across the organization ● Expand supplier engagement infrastructure beyond the webinar series ● Support policies and initiatives that decarbonize manufacturing and transportation