Do I need to report emissions for goods I buy and sell on to customers?

Resold Goods and the GHG Protocol: Who Reports What?

Retailers, fashion brands, furniture companies, and similar businesses often build their entire model around buying finished goods and selling them on for a markup. A common question from these companies is whether they need to report the emissions tied to goods they didn't manufacture themselves. The answer is almost always yes and understanding why comes down to one simple test: did you own the product at some point during the sales cycle?

This article covers resold goods. If you purchase services that you pass onto a customer, there is more tailored guidance here: Do I report emissions from services I buy on behalf of my clients?

The Core Principle: Ownership Drives Reporting

The GHG Protocol's Scope 3 framework is built around organisational and operational boundaries, but for purchased and resold goods, the deciding factor is straightforward: if a company takes ownership of a product at any point even temporarily, while it sits in a warehouse that company must account for emissions associated with it. Simply passing the goods on to a customer afterward doesn't remove that responsibility.

This means two separate emissions categories come into play for any company that buys and resells physical goods.

Step 1: Account for Upstream Emissions in Category 1 (Purchased Goods & Services)

When a company purchases finished goods from a supplier, the emissions generated during manufacturing fall under Scope 3 Category 1: Purchased Goods & Services. This applies regardless of whether the company makes any changes to the product before resale.

In practice, many companies don't have detailed supplier-level emissions data for every product line, so a spend-based method is commonly used: applying an appropriate emissions factor (in kgCO2e per dollar spent, often industry-specific) to the spend to estimate emissions. More mature companies may move toward supplier-specific or product-level data over time, but spend-based is a perfectly acceptable starting point.

Step 2: Account for Downstream Emissions in Category 12 (End-of-Life Treatment of Sold Products)

The responsibility doesn't end at the point of sale. Because the company sold the product to a customer, it must also report the emissions generated when that product is eventually disposed of, under Scope 3 Category 12: End-of-Life Treatment of Sold Products.

This is category is more complex, since it requires thinking about a product's life well beyond the point of sale. It typically relies on assumptions about product material composition and the likely waste treatment pathway in the regions where customers are based.

The Exception: When a Company Never Owns the Product

There's an important exception to this rule. If a company facilitates a purchase on behalf of a customer but never takes ownership or control of the goods, it is not required to report the associated upstream or end-of-life emissions provided it can clearly justify the exclusion in its reporting boundary.

Example: Amazon. Amazon distributes huge volumes of goods on behalf of third-party sellers, but in most cases never purchases or owns that inventory itself it simply facilitates the sale and logistics. As a result, Amazon does not typically need to report the production or end-of-life emissions of those products in its own Scope 3 inventory. It does, however, need to account for the emissions generated by its own operations involved in storing and moving those goods such as warehouses, delivery vans, and trucks since those are assets and activities it owns or controls directly.

Key Takeaways

• Ownership is the deciding factor. If a company buys, holds, and resells goods, it owns the emissions associated with those goods both the manufacturing emissions (Category 1) and the eventual end-of-life emissions (Category 12) even though it didn't make the product or dispose of it itself.
• Reselling doesn't transfer away reporting responsibility. Passing a product on to a customer for a markup doesn't remove the emissions obligation; it adds a downstream category (Category 12) on top of the upstream one (Category 1).
• Facilitation is different from ownership. Companies that arrange purchases on behalf of customers without ever taking title to the goods can exclude the associated emissions but only if they clearly document and justify this in their reported emissions boundary.
• Always account for what you do own. Even in pass-through models, companies still need to report emissions from any assets or operations they directly control such as warehouses or delivery vehicles used to facilitate the transaction.

Getting this distinction right matters not just for accuracy, but for credibility. Under-reporting emissions by misclassifying ownership even unintentionally can expose a company to scrutiny during third-party assurance or stakeholder review. When in doubt, the safest approach is to ask: did we ever own this product? If the answer is yes, the emissions belong in the inventory.

Related Articles

• What Scope 3 categories do I need to measure?
• Why are my emissions from Purchased Goods & Services so big?