Upstream transparency might sound technical, but the idea is perfectly simple. It means a brand telling you exactly what happened before a product reached the shop you purchased it from.
For many water sports companies the biggest environmental impacts are usually nowhere near head office or flagship stores. It sits in fibre production, mills, factories, freight, product use and end-of-life. That’s why Scope 3 often makes up 70 to 90 per cent of total emissions.
If you care about honest sustainability, that split matters. Here’s what the scopes mean, why the GHG Protocol matters, and why Our Souls of the Sea believes that Scope 3 deserves most of the attention, and obfuscation needs calling out.
What Scope 1, Scope 2 and Scope 3 Actually Mean, and Why the Split Matters
Companies are actively encouraged to split emissions reports into three scopes so the numbers stay clear. Otherwise, direct fuel use, bought electricity, and supply-chain pollution all blur into one tidy total, and tidy totals can hide messy truths.
Most businesses use the GHG Protocol’s Scope 3 standard as the main rulebook. It was built by WRI and WBCSD, and it gives companies a shared way to count emissions, compare results and spot where the real impact sits.
| Scope | What it covers | Common examples |
|---|---|---|
| Scope 1 | Direct emissions from owned or controlled sources | Company vehicles, boilers, refrigerant leaks |
| Scope 2 | Indirect emissions from purchased energy | Grid electricity, bought heat, steam or cooling |
| Scope 3 | All other indirect emissions across the value chain | Materials, supplier manufacturing, freight, product use, disposal |
That split matters because it stops companies hiding behind one headline number. It also shows where they have direct control, and where they need to work with others.
Scope 1 and Scope 2 are easier to see because the data sits closer to the business
Scope 1 is the stuff a company burns, runs or leaks itself. Think vans, gas boilers, diesel generators, furnaces and refrigerants from cooling systems.
Scope 2 is bought energy. Usually that means electricity, though it can also include heat, steam, or cooling.
These two scopes are often easier to report because the evidence sits close by. You’ve got bills, meters, fuel records and asset lists. In plain English, the data is already in the building, or at least in the finance folder.
That doesn’t make Scope 1 and 2 small. It simply makes them more visible. And visibility can be deceptive.
Scope 3 covers the full value chain, from raw materials to product end-of-life
Scope 3 is everything else linked to the business. That includes emissions upstream, before the product reaches the warehouse, and downstream, after it leaves.
Upstream can mean purchased goods, raw material production, supplier manufacturing, packaging, business travel, commuting, waste and transport. Downstream can mean product use, repair, resale, distribution and disposal.
The Scope 3 calculation guidance breaks this into 15 categories, but the basic point is easy enough. If Scope 1 and 2 show what happens inside your hull, Scope 3 shows the wake behind the boat.
For product-led brands, that wake is usually the whole story.
Why Scope 3 Matters Most for Real Climate Action
I’ve seen more than a few sustainability decks that celebrate LED lights, office recycling and a couple of electric pool cars. Fine, good, keep doing that. But if the raw materials, mills and freight still carry the main burden, the business hasn’t changed much. It has polished the easy bit.
That’s why Scope 3 matters so much. In many businesses, and especially in apparel and outdoor goods, it forms the biggest slice of total emissions. Recent 2025 and 2026 fashion benchmarks show Scope 3 often dominates the footprint, while Tier 2 suppliers, the mills that spin, dye and finish fabric, can create 45 to 70 per cent of a brand’s Scope 3 emissions on their own.
If you ignore the supply chain, you’re grading yourself on the easy part of the exam.
Real decarbonisation starts where the emissions are. That means materials, design, sourcing, logistics and product life, not only office energy.
A business can look cleaner than it really is if it ignores supply chain emissions
A company can cut electricity use, trim flights, and swap out fleet vehicles. All good moves. Yet it can still carry a heavy footprint through outsourced production, purchased inputs and long-distance shipping.
That’s where greenwashing creeps in. Not always through outright lies, sometimes through selective vision. If a report majors on Scope 1 and 2 while barely touching Scope 3, the picture can look far neater than reality.
Climate reporting should work like a tide chart. You need the full pattern, not a flattering snapshot at one calm moment.
For product brands, the biggest hotspots are often materials, factories and transport
Surf, outdoor and apparel brands know this whether they admit it or not. Synthetic fibres, rubber, foams, laminates, dye houses, wet processing and global freight all add up fast.
Take a wetsuit, a fleece or a technical shell. The footprint often lands upstream, in feedstocks, fabrics and manufacturing energy. Then transport stacks more on top. After sale, washing, drying, repair and disposal keep the impact going.
That’s why Scope 3 in these sectors often sits in the 70 to 90 per cent range. So if a brand says it’s sustainable because the office runs on renewable power, I’m sorry, that’s not the full set. Nice first wave, maybe, but not the whole swell.
What Upstream Transparency Looks Like in Practice
Upstream transparency means knowing where materials come from, which mills process them, which factories assemble the product, what energy those sites use, and how goods move between each step.
That kind of visibility changes decisions. Suddenly, sourcing isn’t only about price. Design isn’t only about looks. Procurement teams can compare suppliers properly, product teams can cut impact at the sketch stage, and marketing claims have to match reality.
There’s also more pressure now. In 2026, brands face growing scrutiny from CSRD, California disclosure rules, IFRS S2 expectations and buyers who want auditable data. California’s climate reporting rules are a good example of where this is heading. The travel is obvious, even if every detail still shifts.
Apple shows how dominant Scope 3 can be, even for a highly controlled business
Sometimes I’m asked to write about the good a company does in a sector I still have serious issues with, and Apple is a pretty clear example of that. But Our Souls of the Sea isn’t here just to call brands out, it’s also about giving credit where it’s earned. We’re big on calling out greenwashing and hypocrisy, sure, yet we also believe the sustainability space works better when it stays collaborative where it can, because that gives us a far better shot at real progress than turning everything into a constant fight.
That being said, I do acknowledge Apples commitment to Scope 3 transparency.
Apple is a handy case study because it runs polished operations and reports in detail, often celebrating quick wins. Yet its 2025 Environmental Progress Report, covering fiscal 2024, shows Scope 3 emissions of 15,228,300 metric tonnes CO2e. That is roughly on par with the annual emissions of an entire country like Estonia, which helps show just how large the number really is.
Purchased goods and services made up the biggest share. Use of sold products was also significant.
That’s the lesson. Tight offices and smart retail spaces don’t erase the larger footprint in the value chain. A business can be clean at the front of house and still carry serious emissions upstream and downstream.
Patagonia
Patagonia stands out (and stands alone in the surf industry) because it treats transparency as part of product integrity, not as a nice extra for the annual report. If you want a figurehead brand for Scope 3 reporting, this is the one that keeps coming up, and for good reason. Scope 3 is the messy bit, the hard bit, the part most brands would rather blur into a tidy slogan. It covers the emissions and impacts tied to materials, mills, factories, shipping, use, repair and disposal, in other words, most of the real story.
Patagonia earns attention here not because it’s spotless, but because it has spent years showing more of its working than most brands ever dare to. Its public stance on climate goals and responsibility links fibres, supplier relationships, repair, durability and product life into one conversation, instead of slicing them into separate bits of marketing. That matters, because the environmental cost of a jacket or pair of boardshorts doesn’t start at checkout and end with a swing tag. It starts upstream, often far upstream, and that’s exactly where Scope 3 reporting forces a brand to look.
And yes, some people will say transparency can become theatre, another polished campaign with the right fonts and a moody photo of the coast. Fair point. But that’s not a reason to duck it. It’s a reason to demand better transparency, earlier, fuller and tied to action. Transparency isn’t a trophy for being flawless. It’s a habit of telling the truth soon enough to make better calls, even when the truth is awkward.
For surf brands, that should hit like an ice cream headache. If you talk about ocean care but stay vague on synthetics, dye houses, mills, freight and end-of-life, the story’s only half built. You can’t wrap yourself in sea-blue branding while keeping the supply chain in the dark. Product integrity has to include supply-chain integrity, and that means facing Scope 3 head-on, otherwise it’s just branding in boardshorts.
Why Scope 3 is Hard to Measure, and how Companies can Still Make Progress
Scope 3 is hard because supply chains are messy. Data sits across tiers of suppliers. Methods vary. Some factories are small, stretched and not set up for carbon reporting. Some brands don’t even know every site in their own chain. That happens more than people like to admit.
Still, hard doesn’t mean optional. If most emissions sit there, skipping Scope 3 means skipping the main problem.
The sensible move is progress, not perfection.
Start with the biggest categories first, then improve the data year by year
The smartest path is usually boring, practical and effective:
- Map the value chain and find the biggest hotspots.
- Estimate where needed, often with spend-based data at first.
- Improve towards average-data, hybrid and supplier-specific methods.
- Review the same categories each year and tighten the numbers.
That’s basically what the GHG Protocol’s technical guidance is there to support. You start broad, then you get sharper.
A rough first map beats a blank page. Every time.
Better reporting only happens when brands work with suppliers, not against them
No brand can solve Scope 3 alone because the data and the fixes sit across suppliers, mills, factories and logistics partners.
So the better approach is partnership. Shared templates help. Training helps. Longer supplier relationships help. Clear incentives help even more. Most of all, carbon data needs to shape buying decisions and product design, not sit in a lonely spreadsheet nobody opens after April.
When brands work with suppliers, reporting gets better. Then decisions get better. Then emissions have a real chance of falling. That’s the chain reaction you want.
Scope 1 and Scope 2 still matter. They’re part of the picture, and they’re often the easiest place to start.
But Scope 3 is where the hidden story lives. It shows the emissions beyond your walls, beyond your invoices, beyond the clean office and the tidy annual report.
If a brand wants to talk seriously about sustainability, it has to follow the product upstream and downstream, then act on what it finds. That’s the honest work. And without that honesty, the climate claim doesn’t hold.
The Cold Hard Truth: Scope 3 Is Still Optional – And That’s Exactly Why It Keeps Getting Skipped
Here’s the part the glossy sustainability reports don’t usually spell out in plain English: even in 2026, full Scope 3 reporting remains optional for the vast majority of brands – especially in the surf, watersports and outdoor sectors.
The GHG Protocol (the rulebook almost every company claims to follow) treats Scope 1 and Scope 2 as the required baseline. Scope 3 is framed as the “other indirect” category you can choose to include… or quietly leave out.
Regulations are tightening, but the net still has huge holes:
- California SB 253 (one of the strongest U.S. rules) only kicks in for companies with > $1 billion in global revenue that do business in the state. Scope 1 & 2 reporting starts in 2026; Scope 3 follows in 2027 with a “safe harbour” / good-faith period. Smaller and mid-sized brands? Still voluntary.
- The U.S. SEC ultimately dropped Scope 3 from its climate disclosure rule entirely.
- The EU’s CSRD is stricter, but it only applies to large companies that meet specific size and materiality thresholds, and even then it phases in over years.
The result? Most water-sports companies are under no legal obligation to disclose the real story. And when something is optional, a surprising number of brands treat it that way.
That’s how you end up with reports that proudly announce the easy wins, while the supply-chain emissions (the actual majority of the footprint) get a polite footnote at best, or vanish entirely. It’s not usually outright lying. It’s selective vision, the kind that lets a brand look “sustainable” without ever having to confront the dye houses, synthetic fibres or global freight that dominate its actual impact.
The water sports industry should follow the Patagonia blueprint as it genuinely shows what’s possible when a company refuses to play the obfuscation game and lays it cards on the table. As a private brand they voluntarily go far beyond what any law requires, because they treat supply-chain transparency as part of product integrity, not a nice-to-have extra. Most of the industry has not made that choice.
Until Scope 3 stops being an optional add-on and becomes the non-negotiable baseline, a lot of “ocean-positive” marketing will remain exactly that, marketing! The biggest emissions stay in the dark precisely because the rules still let brands keep the lights off.
Case Studies of Genuine Impact from Scope 3 transparency the Surf Industry can learn from
Carrefour
Carrefour, a French multinational retail and wholesaling corporation, found that Scope 3 made up 97% of its carbon footprint, which pushed it toward supply-chain collaboration rather than only focusing on its own operations. That led to the “20 Megaton Project,” a co-developed initiative with suppliers aimed at reducing embedded emissions linked to its products and services by 20 million tonnes by 2030. The case study also says the company moved away from ad hoc sustainability projects and began integrating purpose and sustainability into how the business operates.
Mejuri
Mejuri, a regenerative mining company whose greenhouse-gas inventory showed that Scope 3 accounted for 97% of total emissions, so the company continued to prioritise value-chain decarbonisation over Scope 1 and 2 cuts while generating intense focus on cross-industry partnerships. This increased traceability of precious materials, and co-investment in initiatives such as Regeneration Enterprises, which works on legacy mine remediation and responsible sourcing. The case study also notes that this collaboration produced concrete outcomes in 2023, including repairs to 1,150 linear meters of stream and 20 acres of habitat in Alaska and the Yukon.