Over 80% of shippers outsource part of their freight capacity procurement to third-party providers, making Scope 3 emissions a significant challenge. Due to the complex nature of outsourced logistics, shippers often struggle to accurately quantify their portion of emissions generated by carriers.  

In order to get better visibility of Scope 3 emissions, Amazon worked with three Climate Pledge signatories, Belgian Post, Poste Italiane, and Intelcom to develop parcel-level emissions reporting. The collaboration is a natural one –  Amazon is a shipper and uses third-party carriers to deliver parcels to customers in parts of its network. Belgian Post, Poste Italiane, and Intelcom are carriers that provide parcel delivery services to Amazon and other large shippers.

With the support of an Amazon Web Services prototyping engineering team, they built a simple temporary calculator using the GLEC (Global Logistics Emission Council) Guidance V3.0 framework, the global method for calculating and reporting logistics emissions to convert raw data points into greenhouse gas emissions data. This first step enabled carriers to identify necessary data points, understand where they reside in their organizations and gain practical experience in data extraction. An initial test was then replicated with an increasing number of parcels to gauge the time, effort,  and resources needed to scale this to all of the carriers’ shipments.

As a result, Belgian Post, Poste Italiane, and Intelcom have now gone on to develop their own parcel-level reporting to Amazon and customers using these carriers, empowering them to accurately calculate and reduce Scope 3 emissions.