In the past month both Amazon and Microsoft announced that suppliers will be required to report carbon emissions data and to have established emissions reduction goals. The big tech companies will select suppliers based on levels of emissions and reduction progress.

With these corporate policies, Amazon and Microsoft have made supply chain emissions reporting a must have for thousands of companies.

Meanwhile, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is expected to release its final climate disclosure regulations in October of this year and many observers expect those regulations to exclude supply chain emissions. Thus the corporate policies of large companies are effectively making climate disclosure policy and leaving the regulators behind.

GLYNT is seeing the same phenomena in other industries too. Industry collaborations in the automotive, steel, pharmaceutical and cement sectors have led to shared frameworks for supply chain emissions disclosures. The buyers – such as Ford, BMW, Honda and Toyota – have come together to ask for product-level emissions reporting from suppliers.

So while the SEC release in October will help to clarify regulatory requirements for the market, the demand for granular, accurate and abundant carbon emissions data is already soaring. And legal challenges to the SEC regulations will be simply noise.

When large buyers require suppliers to report emissions, they do it.

If you need accurate, actual, compliant emissions data for your company and its products, talk to GLYNT. We’re the global sustainability data service that transforms primary data sources into report-ready sustainability data. Get an abundance of detailed sustainability data for reduction planning. Using advanced AI, we’ve made the job of rounding up sustainability data easier and efficient.

A warehouse aisle
Photo: @ruchindra | Unsplash