Scope 3 Is Coming for Your Freight Data. Here Is What Ecommerce Shippers Will Be Asked For

A quiet change in Australian accounting standards is about to land on the desks of businesses that have never thought about emissions reporting, including online retailers whose only exposure is the boxes they ship.

Here is the short version. Under AASB S2, Australia's mandatory climate reporting standard, the largest companies began reporting in 2025, and the second group of entities has now been pulled in. These reports must eventually include Scope 3 emissions: not the emissions from the reporting company's own operations, but the emissions generated across its value chain. Scope 3 is not mandatory in a reporter's first year, but it becomes mandatory from the second reporting period, which means the clock is already running.

Why This Reaches Businesses the Standard Never Names

Why does that matter to a business too small to be captured by the standard? Because Scope 3 is, by definition, other people's emissions. When a large retailer, marketplace or wholesale customer has to report its value-chain footprint, it goes looking for data from its suppliers. If you supply or ship for bigger businesses, the emissions of your freight become a line in their report, and sooner or later a questionnaire lands in your inbox asking for numbers you have never had to produce.

Freight is one of the hardest lines to answer well. Transport emissions sit outside your own walls, spread across carriers, services and lanes, and the practitioners working on this openly describe Scope 3 completeness as the industry's hardest problem. Most SMEs answering these questionnaires today fall back on crude estimates: total spend multiplied by an industry factor. It ticks the box, but it is barely connected to what you actually ship, and it gives you no lever to improve the number.

The Lever That Cuts the Bill and the Number Together

There is a better starting point, and it happens to be the same one that cuts your freight bill: stop shipping air.

Carriers price on dimensional weight, so an oversized carton pays for the space it occupies, not just what is inside. The same maths applies to emissions. A truck moves volume. Every half-empty box on it means more vehicle movements for the same goods sold. When cartons are right-sized against what you actually ship, you send fewer cubic metres through the network for the same orders, and both the invoice and the freight footprint drop together. It is the rare sustainability action that is not a cost, it is a saving with an emissions co-benefit.

This is what smart cartonisation does. It reads your real order history, works out the carton set that actually fits what you ship, and applies it order by order, across the carriers Senditt books with. And because it is modelled on your own data, you get something a spend-based estimate can never give you: a defensible, data-backed statement of how your packaging decisions changed the volume you push through the freight network, before and after. When the customer questionnaire arrives, that is the difference between a guess and an answer.

Do Not Wait for the Questionnaire

Our suggestion, if you ship for or sell to larger Australian businesses: do not wait for the questionnaire. Work out now how much of your freight is air. You will either find you are already tight, which is worth knowing, or you will find a saving that pays for itself immediately and improves the number you will eventually be asked for. Either way, you walk into the Scope 3 conversation with data instead of a shrug.

The reporting wave is not optional and it is not slowing down. But for shippers, the first sensible response is not a consultant or a spreadsheet of emission factors. It is a smaller box.

Want to know how much of your freight is air? Send us your rough monthly order volume and we will model it on your own orders. One number back, no commitment. Book a freight review.