Accounting for 3.11

Hello all!

Our customer produces beverages, some of them cooled some not, both in department stores, wholesale and restaurants.
Is there a requirement to account for the indirect emissions of electricity used to cool the product.
We had some internal discussions about this but can´t come to a clear decision.
If yes, there are a lot of variables to consider…
Is it valid to make an estimation of the average time the drinks are cooled in the various locations multiplied by a percentage of the electricity needed for cooling?

Additionally we have a similar issue with another customer.
Here it is wood products, some are manufactured to furniture, others are parts of buildings.
Again, we couln´t define a clear strategy here, since the application of the materials is very vague.

Hoping for some interesting replies,
All the best, Matthias

Hi Matthias,
to my knowledge, cooling of products such as beverages during distribution is in required within scope 3 category 9 “downstream transportation and distribution”. You might, for instance, multiply the average electric power consumed to cool a unit weight of the beverage by the average time they stay in the store, then use an average electricity EF.
For the second scenario, the situation might be more nuanced and concern other scope 3 categories as well. For instance, you may or may not account for emissions in the downstream categories, depending on whether the end use of the product is known.
Hope this helps.

I have come across some companies that do account for cooling of the beverage as part of their Category 11: Use of sold products (indirect).

The accounted for the energy required to cool their drink from room temp to the refrigerator temp depending on the material of the beverage was held in (e.g. glass, plastic, metal), I think some sort of LCA was done on this.

Depending on the drink size, they assumed the number of times it may be returned to a fridge - e.g. if it was a can, assumption was it was consumed in one go and not returned to the fridge. And for others (e.g. a 1-litre/2-litre bottle), it was assumed the drink was returned to the fridge. For each “return to the fridge” a nominal amount of energy was assumed to have been lost and therefore needed to be added in to return back to the original temperature.

Hope that makes sense? It was quite confusing when I first looked at it a while ago and I had to really digest. It’s been a while so I may have also missed parts of what else they considered in their calculation.

But headline is some companies do cover this in their indirect use of sold products.