Most carbon isn't decided in a sustainability report. Someone picks a supplier, weighs price and lead time, signs, and quietly locks in years of emissions nobody ever scored. The data existed. It just never entered the moment the choice got made.
Why carbon never reaches the decision layer
In most orgs, two systems never talk to each other. One produces targets and disclosures, the other produces purchase orders and vendor contracts. The emissions leak out in the gap between them. And that gap is huge, because supply chains drive up to 80% of a company's total greenhouse gas footprint. The people deciding your real environmental impact are buyers and logistics leads, and most of them have never seen a carbon number in their workflow.
Why Scope 3 is the hard part
Scope 1 and Scope 2 are direct and trackable. The real weight sits in Scope 3, the upstream emissions you don't control, which averages around 74% of an industry's footprint. The problem is that visibility falls off a cliff past your Tier 1 suppliers. This is exactly where most carbon emission reduction in supply chain efforts stall. Not at strategy, at the data pipeline. You can't weigh a number you can't get.
Why mandates don't move the needle
The instinct is to hand suppliers a list of ESG requirements. That mostly generates email. The suppliers with the heaviest emissions are usually the ones with the least capacity to respond, running thin margins with no sustainability staff. The teams seeing real results invest in a few high-impact suppliers directly instead of pushing the whole base at once.
Making it real-time
IoT feeds, AI procurement platforms, and joined-up analytics can already surface carbon intensity at the point of purchase. The blocker isn't the tech. It's the discipline to act on the number once it's on screen. That last step, turning a visible value into a different choice, is the one almost everyone underestimates.
Your turn
If you had to add one carbon signal to your sourcing decisions tomorrow, where would the data even come from? Drop how your stack handles Scope 3 visibility in the comments, because that pipeline is where most of us are stuck.
