From kroner to kilos

For years our largest emission number was built out of invoices.
This year we rebuilt it out of weight.

Where our emissions actually sit

Almost none of our footprint sits where you can walk up and point at it. Scope 1, our direct emissions, which basically come down to a small fleet of company vehicles, is 0.06 per cent. Scope 2 is the energy we buy, and that comes down to geography: Leksvik and our Swedish operations run on renewable power (zero emissions), Wrocław and Suzhou largely cannot. Solar panels on the roof in Suzhou now cover around a fifth of that site’s yearly electricity.

Then there is Scope 3, which is everything else. It runs to fifteen categories: transport in and out, business travel, commuting, the machines we invest in, what happens to a component once it reaches the end of its life. For Alvi, one of those fifteen is bigger than the other fourteen put together. Category 3.1, purchased goods and services, is 64 per cent of our total footprint on its own. Scope 3 as a whole is 83 per cent. The emissions that count were settled long before anything reached a factory floor, in a material specification, at a supplier, sometimes in a customer’s design office.

Weighing a backpack by its receipts

We first put a number on that in 2023 by multiplying what we paid. One emission factor for plastics, one for metals, a handful for everything else. It gave us a rough map while we waited for data we did not have, and nobody involved pretended otherwise.

But what you pay for something tells you very little about what it weighs. It is a bit like working out how heavy your backpack is by going through the receipts for everything in it. A titanium stove costs many times what a tin of beans costs and weighs a fraction as much. Price moves with exchange rates, with supplier margins, with how specialised a part is. Buy the same kilo of polymer at two different prices and the spreadsheet decides one of them is worse for the climate. If you want to know what you are carrying, you put the bag on a scale.

So for our 2025 reporting we changed the method. The calculation now runs on kilograms of material actually bought, measured against roughly twenty-five factors for plastics and five for metals rather than one apiece.

The result was not the one we wanted. Our total footprint came out at about half of what we had already published. Nothing changed in the factories. The old estimate had simply been too high, and we restated 2024 on the new basis so the two years describe operations rather than accounting.

What we still cannot see

73.9 per cent of Scope 3 now comes from primary or activity-based data. The rest is still estimated, and some of it is rough. At one of our facilities, metal purchases are still calculated from spend, because the purchasing system could not export weights. That system is being rebuilt so the figures are there next year. At another plant nobody could pull the packaging figures at all, so a colleague weighed a cardboard box and multiplied.

The next step is not ours to take alone. Material selection and part design are collaborative processes built around client requirements. That is why our 2030 Scope 3 target is an engagement target: 75 per cent of core suppliers, measured by spend, holding SBTi-aligned climate targets of their own. The first rounds of those conversations begin this autumn. We do not yet know what percentage we are starting from.

We always improve.