Scope 1 is your own fuel. Scope 2 is your electricity. Scope 3 is everything your organization causes but doesn't own. For a manufacturer, producer, or distributor, the biggest slice by far is freight.
The diesel burn belongs to your carrier's Scope 1. But the GHG Protocol counts it as your Scope 3, because you bought the movement. And increasingly, your customers own the ask: retailer scorecards, CDP questionnaires, and procurement teams all want supplier emissions data, in a standard format, on a deadline.
The hard part was never the math. Most mid-market businesses can't produce a complete, load-by-load record of what moved, where, how, and how far. That's exactly the record LiveLOADS already builds.
Inbound raw materials and components. The freight your suppliers' carriers, or yours, moved to your plants.
Your finished goods moving out to customers and distribution centres.
Reported under the GHG Protocol, calculated along GLEC Framework methods, requested by CDP and big-box vendor scorecards. The paperwork is standardized. The inputs usually aren't.
Every load in the platform already carries origin, destination, mode, weight, and carrier. Emissions reporting adds zero data entry. The audit trail does the collecting.
Each shipment is converted using mode-specific emission factors, following the GLEC Framework, the recognized standard for logistics emissions accounting.
Where carriers report primary data, actual fuel and actual distance, it replaces default factors. Estimates where that's all there is, measured data where it isn't. Each figure labeled so auditors know which is which.
Category 4 and 9 totals by period, per carrier, per lane. Exported in the format CDP and retailer scorecards ask for, without a consultant translating in between.
| Mode | g CO₂e / tonne-km | When it's the right call |
|---|---|---|
| Air freight | ~600+ | Genuine emergencies only. The most carbon per kilogram in logistics by an order of magnitude. |
| LTL — road | ~80–120 | Partial loads, terminal-to-terminal consolidation. More stops per tonne, but no empty miles on your account. |
| FTL — road | ~60–90 | Full trailers. The dominant mode for Canadian businesses, and where carrier selection moves the number. |
| Reefer — road | ~80–110 | Temperature control adds fuel burn. Worth knowing per lane, not just per load. |
| Intermodal — rail + truck | ~18–30 | Long lanes at roughly a third of road emissions. Slower door to door, which is the trade-off the dashboard makes visible. |
Illustrative ranges aligned with published GLEC-consistent factors for North American operations. Actual reporting uses the current factor tables, per mode and fuel type.
When a retail customer or CDP asks for supplier emissions, the answer is a report, not a project. The data was already yours. Now it's formatted for the question.
Who's fast, who's cheap, who's late, and now who's clean. Carrier scorecards gain an emissions column, and renewal conversations gain a new axis that carriers are actively measured on.
Mode-shift opportunities surface from your own lanes: freight where intermodal trims two-thirds of the footprint at a tolerable time cost. Every tonne switched is in the record. Verifiable, reportable, real.
An emissions figure nobody can trace is marketing, not reporting. Every number on the sustainability dashboard carries its shipment record with it, the same audit trail finance already trusts. Estimates are labeled estimates. Measured data is labeled measured.
If a customer, an auditor, or your own sustainability committee asks where a figure came from, the answer is a document, not a methodology appendix.
A free 20-minute audit of your last 30 days of shipping. We map the three money leaks in your operation. The emissions record is already sitting inside them. Keep the map either way.
Book your free audit