Four Conversations That Are Shaping How Companies Tackle Scope 3. Lessons from the PCF Clinic

Last week, PACT joined the Scope 3 Peer Group's PCF Clinic in Chicago (virtually!), but the energy came through.

Over 80 questions submitted in advance, a packed agenda and a conversation that ran out of time before it ran out of steam.

Here's what we're still thinking about this week:

The "modelled emission factors" gap is real: and we're already working on it

Matt Seiler from Schneider Electric put words to something a lot of people in the market are feeling. There's a gap between spend-based emission factors and a fully calculated PACT-aligned PCF. And companies aren't sitting around waiting for that gap to close. They're already asking suppliers targeted questions about the two or three parameters that drive most of the footprint, and folding the answers into their accounting. One company described doing exactly this for dairy. Veritas confirmed it holds up under Big Four assurance.

So the question isn't whether this works. It's whether we can make it official: build globally agreed factor tables, get academic validation, embed them in existing frameworks. So that companies without LCA tools can use it, and auditors don't have to be persuaded from scratch every time.

That kind of work needs a neutral, shared home. That's what the PACT community is for and exploring.

Suppliers don't resist PCF requests because they don't want to help

They resist because they don't know what they're being asked to do, or why. When suppliers understand what the data will actually be used for - and when we're clear about what a PACT PCF data package contains, and what it doesn't expose - the conversation changes. Comparability and trust are still real challenges. But clarity is the foundation for both, not pressure.

Monetising decarbonisation is starting to happen

Kelly Gilroy from Univar Solutions brought a perspective that doesn't always get enough airtime. As a distributor with over 100,000 customers and 3,000 suppliers, Univar sits right at the intersection of supply and demand for carbon data. And what Kelly described was a market that's beginning to move.

Univar now requires customers to complete a survey before receiving a PCF, capturing what they plan to do with the data and what quality they actually need. More mature customers are increasingly saying: don't give me spend-based data. That signal is getting louder. And it matters for how all of us think about data quality standards going forward.

The comparability problem needs a more honest conversation

Two PACT-conformant PCFs for the same product category can show very different numbers, not because one product is lower carbon, but because of the methodological choices made in calculating the footprint. A procurement buyer seeing those numbers side by side will pick the lower one. That's a problem. And it's one to solve before PCFs can reliably work as procurement signals in complex manufacturing.

The PACT Usability Model which we're currently piloting with 30 corporates and several solution providers, is part of our answer to this. A shared language for what a PCF discloses, and whether it's fit for a specific purpose, is how we get from data exchange to decisions that actually hold up.

There's a lot still to do. And rooms like Chicago, and the conversations that spill out of them, are how it gets done.