What Are Scope 3 Emissions - And Why It Matters When Buying Sportswear

Athletes - professional and amateur alike - are increasingly pushing sports manufacturers to be more transparent on their sustainablity and environmental impacts, which has led many sportswear brands to publish a number for their emissions. What that number rarely makes clear is where those emissions actually sit, and for most brands in endurance sport, the honest answer is barely inside their own operations at all.

Scope 1, 2, and 3 are the three categories used to sort a company's emissions by where they happen. Scope 1 is emissions the company creates directly: its own vehicles, its own boilers, its own on-site fuel use. Scope 2 is emissions from the energy it buys in, mainly electricity. Scope 3 is everything else: emissions created by other companies on the brand's behalf, before a product reaches the brand and after it leaves the brand's hands.

Where Scope 3 sits in a piece of kit

For a sportswear brand, that third category is where almost everything happens. Growing the cotton or extracting the oil for synthetic fibres, spinning and dyeing the fabric, cutting and sewing it in a factory the brand doesn't own, shipping it from that factory to a warehouse and then to you, and eventually whatever happens to it once it's worn out: all of that sits in Scope 3. None of it shows up in Scope 1 or 2, and none of it is within the brand's direct control in the way its own electricity bill is.

The scale of that imbalance is worth being precise about. Industry analysis of apparel and footwear companies consistently puts Scope 3 at 90% or more of total emissions, with some brand-level disclosures running as high as 96 to 97%.² The emissions from a companies own operations, the Scope 1 and 2 figure most likely to appear in a headline claim, typically account for less than 10% of the total.

That gap matters because it's exactly where the incentive to under-report sits. Scope 1 and 2 data is comparatively easy to gather: a brand controls its own offices, vans, and electricity meters. Scope 3 means going to suppliers, several tiers removed, and asking them for data they may not collect and have no obligation to hand over. A brand can publish a genuinely accurate Scope 1 and 2 figure, put it front and centre, and still stay quiet on the 90-plus percent of its footprint sitting in the supply chain. That isn't necessarily dishonest. But it is, at best, a partial picture, and at worst a convenient one.

Why Scope 3 is hard to fix

It's worth being fair that measuring Scope 3 is a harder problem than measuring Scope 1 and 2, and the difficulty is real, not manufactured. Having applied the Ethical Endurance Framework across a wide variety of sportswear and product brands, four distinct barriers show up again and again.

The first is structural. Many sportswear brands sit inside larger corporate groups, and group-level reporting doesn't always trickle down to brand level. A parent company will often publish a single operational emissions figure covering every brand in its portfolio, without ever breaking out what belongs to any one of them specifically. A real emissions programme can exist somewhere in the ownership structure, but it simply isn't visible at the level a customer is actually buying from.

The second is measuring without quantifying. Some brands can describe where their Scope 3 emissions come from without publishing a number against any of it: a lifecycle breakdown by broad category, given qualitatively in press interviews or marketing copy, rather than published as a quantified, categorised dataset with a stated methodology. While a genuine acknowledgement of the problem, it leaves no way for a reader to check the figures or track them over time.

The third is dependency on other people's data. A brand's only published emissions figure sometimes comes not from the brand itself, but from a logistics or manufacturing partner measuring its own slice of the chain, typically freight or transport. That's a real number, but it's a narrow slice of the footprint next to materials and manufacturing, and it exists because a partner organisation has chosen to measure it, not because the brand built its own reporting.

The fourth is capacity. Smaller, independent brands are often open about lacking the resources to measure and communicate their carbon emissions. They lack the purchasing leverage to compel tier-two and tier-three suppliers to hand over energy data, and don't have an in-house sustainability team to chase it. A brand in that position isn't hiding anything. It faces real barriers which prevent it from being able to build the measurement yet.

The fifth pattern is intent without action. A stated intention is worth noting, but it scores no differently from silence until it becomes a published figure.

What good disclosure actually looks like

The reality is that most sportswear brands are dealing with a combination of the barriers above, and the result is something closer to a spectrum than a "pass or fail". At the strongest end are brands with a genuinely categorised Scope 3 breakdown: independent verification, multiple years of comparable data, a numerical split across the material GHG Protocol categories rather than a single combined figure, and often a validated reduction target attached to it. This standard is still rare in sportswear, but it exists, and it's what every other brand should be judged against.

Other brands acknowledge and partially quantify their supply chain footprint without reaching a full, independently checked breakdown. These may have real but partial data from their suppliers or third-parties rather than built in-house, but are demonstrating an awareness and willingness to improve and change their operations.

At the other end are brands which currently have no published Scope 3 data at all. The reasons may be due to a stated future intention, an ownership structure that hasn't disaggregated its reporting, or a genuine resource constraint. The point of the assessments isn't to punish brands for not yet finding a solution to a difficult problem. It's to be clear about who is actually making progress.

What to look for when you're buying

You don't need to read a corporate sustainability report to apply any of this. We've done the hard work for you in our Ethical Endurance Buying Guides which help you make an informed decision as an athlete and customer.

If buying outside our guides, when a brand makes a carbon claim, check whether the figure covers Scope 3 or only Scope 1 and 2; a headline reduction to a Scope 1 and 2 figure that's a tenth of the real footprint isn't much of a claim. Check whether a breakdown exists by category, or whether it's a single combined number with no detail behind it. And check whether a brand has a published, externally validated target, since SBTi validation specifically requires material Scope 3 categories to be included, not just the easy ones.³

None of this means you should discount a brand for having gaps in its Scope 3 reporting, most do. What's worth discounting is the brand that talks about carbon in general terms while sitting on a supply chain it has never bothered to ask about, or that leads with an own-operations figure designed to look like the whole picture.