Partnership to transform emissions reporting in tech supply chains
29 July 2025
Scott Logic has announced a new open-source partnership with the Green Web Foundation that will make supply chain emissions data easier to access, interpret and report — a breakthrough for sustainability efforts in the ICT and technology sectors.
As UK Government departments face increasing expectations around transparent, accountable emissions reporting, this new collaboration offers practical tools that reduce administrative burden while supporting alignment with national net-zero goals. The initiative is expected to help organisations prepare for new deliverables anticipated in the Government’s updated Digital Sustainability Strategy due later in 2025.
Currently, accessing a company's emissions data requires manually reviewing detailed sustainability reports, with no guarantee that the relevant information is available. This approach presents significant barriers and prevents organisations from easily benchmarking data, automatically calculating emissions from suppliers, or effectively tracking carbon reduction progress, ultimately blocking the acceleration of industry-wide climate action.
The new partnership combines the non-profit Green Web Foundation's carbon.txt project - which establishes a standardised location for companies to publish sustainability data - with software consultancy, Scott Logic's Technology Carbon Standard (TCS) Schema, which provides the structure for organising that data.
Together, this provides a complete system for discovering and using digital emissions data and enabling automatic supply chain calculations, which collectively advance digital carbon transparency and create incentives for companies to more accurately report their data.
Oliver Cronk, Technology Director and Sustainable Technology lead at Scott Logic, comments:
“This has been an entrenched and embedded problem for several years. The ICT sector now consumes approximately 4% of all global electricity, but most organisations have lacked clear methods to measure or share information about their digital carbon emissions. This has led to arduous and manual work being required to review multiple documents and identify the right data, which has dramatically slowed sustainability reporting.
"However, we now have a solution; carbon.txt solves the 'where to find it' element, whilst the Technology Carbon Standard Schema solves the 'how to structure it' issue. Together, they create a complete system for discovering and using digital emissions data. This means that, rather than relying on rough estimates based on financial spend, companies can now gather precise emissions data directly from suppliers' published carbon.txt files, which dramatically streamlines the process and supports faster and more accurate reporting.”
Hannah Smith, Director of Operations at Green Web Foundation, also comments:
“The partnership creates real incentives for suppliers to proactively reduce their actual emissions rather than simply claiming they have, with the technology acting as infrastructure for accountability. Both Green Web Foundation and Scott Logic recognise that the ICT and technology sectors have the expertise to lead on climate transparency, and we believe that the combined solution provides the foundation for organisations to move beyond current limitations in digital emissions reporting. The entire system is open source and designed for immediate implementation. Companies can begin with whatever emissions data they currently possess, document their methodologies clearly, and publish information in a format that enables discovery and comparison across the industry."