Mars, Meta, Patagonia and L’Oréal Outline Strategies to Address Scope 3 Emissions Across global Supply Chains

Large multinational companies are intensifying efforts to understand and reduce Scope 3 emissions as corporate climate strategies increasingly shift beyond operational footprints to encompass entire value chains. At the GreenBiz26 conference in Phoenix, sustainability leaders from Mars, Meta, Patagonia, and L’Oréal discussed how their organizations are measuring and addressing emissions that occur outside their direct operations.

Scope 3 emissions include indirect greenhouse gas emissions that occur throughout a company’s supply chain, from raw material extraction to product use and disposal. According to climate consultancy The Carbon Trust, these emissions often account for between 70% and 90% of a company’s total footprint, making them one of the most challenging areas of corporate decarbonization.

Despite persistent challenges around data accuracy and supplier engagement, companies are experimenting with new approaches to improve emissions visibility and accelerate decarbonization across global supply networks.

Renewable Energy Emerging as a Key Lever

For companies such as Mars and Meta, renewable energy procurement is becoming a central strategy for reducing supply chain emissions.

Mars has adopted what its leadership describes as a comprehensive approach to Scope 3 accounting. The company attempts to measure emissions across the full lifecycle of its products, including agricultural inputs, packaging, transportation, retail distribution, and even the energy required by consumers to prepare certain products.

This approach has helped the food and confectionery company identify opportunities for emissions reductions across its value chain. According to the company’s latest sustainability reporting, Mars has reduced supply chain emissions by 16.4 percent compared with its 2015 baseline.

In 2025, Mars launched a program designed to accelerate renewable electricity adoption among its suppliers. The initiative allows Mars to purchase renewable energy certificates on behalf of suppliers, enabling emissions reductions that contribute to the company’s Scope 3 targets.

The program aims to reduce approximately 10 percent of Mars’ supply chain emissions by expanding renewable electricity adoption among partners. Renewable energy is often one of the most accessible decarbonization options for suppliers, particularly in industries where electricity represents a significant share of emissions.

Meta, meanwhile, faces a different Scope 3 profile due to the infrastructure requirements of its digital services. The company’s supply chain emissions are heavily influenced by the construction and operation of large-scale data centers.

To address this, Meta has focused on expanding renewable energy procurement and improving transparency in how emissions reductions are calculated. The company now reports two versions of its emissions inventory. One follows the Greenhouse Gas Protocol methodology, while another incorporates market-based mechanisms such as renewable energy procurement agreements.

This approach is intended to provide auditors and stakeholders with greater clarity on how different decarbonization strategies contribute to emissions reductions.

Meta has also explored new low-carbon technologies within its infrastructure. The company has begun piloting mass timber as a building material in certain data center projects, an approach that could reduce embodied carbon associated with construction materials.

Supply Chain Structure Shapes Decarbonization Strategies

For Patagonia and L’Oréal, decarbonization efforts are shaped by supply chains that are more dependent on materials, manufacturing, and logistics.

Patagonia reports that approximately 90% of its Scope 3 emissions fall within the category of purchased goods and services, particularly raw materials used in textile production.

To estimate its emissions footprint, the outdoor apparel company combines multiple data sources, including industry material sustainability indexes, life cycle assessment data, and supplier-specific information. This hybrid approach allows the company to estimate emissions across complex textile supply chains while improving accuracy over time.

However, translating data into emissions reductions remains difficult. Many textile suppliers lack contractual obligations to reduce emissions, making it challenging for brands to encourage capital investments in cleaner technologies.

To address this barrier, Patagonia has experimented with financing energy efficiency upgrades for selected suppliers. By covering the full cost of certain equipment improvements, the company aims to enable emissions reductions that suppliers might otherwise struggle to fund.

These arrangements effectively function as carbon offset agreements, where the brand finances decarbonization investments and then accounts for the resulting emissions reductions within its supply chain strategy.

L’Oréal faces a different emissions profile due to the diversity of its product portfolio and marketing channels. Within its North American operations, roughly 40% of Scope 3 emissions come from raw materials and packaging, while logistics account for about 10%.

The company has also identified digital media and advertising as a significant emissions source, reflecting the growing carbon footprint of digital infrastructure and data-intensive marketing campaigns.

Data Quality Remains a Major Challenge

Across all four companies, sustainability leaders emphasized that improving the quality and consistency of Scope 3 data remains a key challenge.

Supply chains often involve thousands of suppliers across multiple tiers, making direct measurement difficult. Companies frequently rely on industry averages, emissions factors, and modeling approaches to estimate emissions where supplier-specific data is unavailable.

While imperfect, these estimates are increasingly considered necessary for building credible decarbonization strategies.

Many organizations are also experimenting with collaborative approaches that involve sharing renewable energy procurement opportunities, providing financial support for supplier upgrades, and improving traceability within supply networks.

These efforts reflect a broader shift in corporate climate strategy. After years of focusing on operational emissions reductions, companies are increasingly targeting emissions embedded in supply chains and product lifecycles.

Moving from Measurement to Action

Executives at the GreenBiz26 panel emphasized that measuring Scope 3 emissions is only the first step toward meaningful climate action.

Decarbonizing supply chains requires collaboration between companies, suppliers, and technology providers, along with financial mechanisms that make low-carbon investments viable for partners across global supply networks.

As regulatory expectations increase and stakeholders demand more transparency, companies are expected to move beyond emissions accounting and demonstrate tangible progress in reducing supply chain emissions.

For large multinational companies, the path to net-zero will likely depend less on internal efficiency improvements and more on transforming the systems that produce, transport, and power the goods and services they rely on.

Source: www.esgdive.com