What is a tag?
A tag is like a keyword or label you assign to your activity data. Its main purpose is to filter or aggregate emissions by specific characteristics.
When you upload emissions data using the pre-defined, required columns in the templates, you essentially answer the question, "How many emissions did we cause within a given timeframe for a certain category?" Adding 'tagging' columns to your data, however, allows you to ask and answer a lot more questions about the data you upload. For instance, you could add extra tags to ascertain:
Which department caused most of our Business travel emissions?
Which business purposes (e.g. particular events or projects) caused the most emissions in March 2023?
And so on.
What is the benefit of tagging your data?
Tags allow you to make your data much more granular by allowing you to organise in it in a way that is specific to your organisation's context whilst providing context on the data itself. This can help you to dive deep into the causes of your emissions, allowing you to draw more precise conclusions about where to focus your emission reduction efforts.
For instance, the example below shows how adding a 'department' tag helps to explain the increase in Purchased Goods and Services emissions in 2023 by showing the growth in emissions coming from purchases made by Sales and Marketing:
How should I get started with tagging my data?
The question "Which tags to use" is not an easy one to answer. Nevertheless, there are two approaches you can begin with:
Start with what you have. That is, whatever is already in your activity data and intuitively seems like a good tag.
What are the emission-related questions you want to answer? This is usually the more efficient but also trickier approach. If you know the questions you want to answer, you should know right away which tags to use. Examples include:
Which department causes the most emissions? → Add a department tag
Is there a significant difference in Business Travel emissions for facilities that are located in Italy vs in the United States? → Add a country tag
Do you host events which you want to see the associated emissions for? → Add an event tag
How do I add tags to my activity data?
First, let's quickly review how uploading data works on the Plan A Sustainability Platform.
Each emission category and each calculation method comes with its own template to fill in your activity data. For example, for Business Travel (calculation method "Distance travelled") the template to fill in looks like this (with some sample data included):
For instance, in the example that all relevant stakeholders agree that the tags "department" and "country" are relevant tags to analyse Business travel emissions further. To add those to your activity data (i.e. the template as it is depicted in the screenshot above), all you need to do is add those as two extra columns like this:
This allows you to filter emissions in your dashboards using the breakdown feature accordingly.
There are no limits to adding tags (or optional columns) to your activity data - add as many as you need!
⚠️ It is of utmost importance that you keep very good tag 'hygiene', that is:
You can use the same tags across different calculation methods and emission categories but make sure they are called and spelt exactly the same to show 'as one' when filtering for tags on 'Measure Emissions' pages.
The same applies to the values that you use for each tag. For example, if you add a tag "department" and misspell "Customer Success" as "Customer Suscces", this will result in emissions being allocated to "two different" departments (Customer Success and Customer Suscces).
Rest assured that we are working on a central tag management solution in the mid-term which shall make it easy for you to spot and correct any mistakes of that nature.
What are some general tags I could use?
The below are some examples of tags that you could use across all emissions categories:
Clusters of facilities by Geography, Market, or Subsidiary
e.g. DACH, Western Europe, MENA, North America, APAC, LATAM, etc.
Project/client
e.g. business activity related to specific projects or clients.
Team/Department
e.g. business activity related to specific projects or clients.
Note: in this case, it's good to highlight data which is not team-specific as such by using 'company wide' or 'non-team specific'.
Event
e.g. tie things such as travel, food, space rental and energy usage to specific events.
Which tags could I use for specific Emission Categories?
Below are some examples of where tagging could help you better analyse your emissions. Note that not all emissions categories are covered, since tagging is not essential, and doesn't make sense in every scenario.
As such, the below are purely suggestions. The beauty of tagging is that it is optional and entirely customisable depending on what makes sense for your organisation.
There are also some suggestions which are made for multiple emission categories. This is because you can use the same tag across multiple emission categories and filter accordingly. For instance, using the tags, 'Supplier name', for all upstream emissions categories (Scope 3, Categories 1 through to 8) where relevant can help you extrapolate emissions associated with individual suppliers across categories.
Scope 1
Stationary Combustion
Stationary Combustion
Stationary combustion emissions are those that emerge from burning solid, liquid or gaseous fuels on site (i.e. not in a vehicle). Some interesting tags for you to explore might be:
Source - to track from which appliances exactly your emissions emerge. Potential tag values of the tag "source" might be:
Boiler
Furnace A
Furnace B
Kiln
and so on…
Mobile Combustion
Mobile Combustion
Mobile Combustion emissions are those that emerge from your vehicles burning fossil fuels. Some possible tags include:
Vehicle type - While the distinction of emissions based on different fuel types might be given due to your chosen calculation method (in this case "Fuel consumption"), you perhaps want to further analyse your emissions by particular vehicle types like passenger cars, transporters, scooters to only name a few.
Purpose of trip - Knowing how many Mobile Combustion emissions you produced can be helpful - knowing why could be even more insightful. What if most of them are caused because of "Business Travel"? How could knowing more about your emissions' causes help you in tackling and reducing them?
Scope 2
Purchased Electricity
Purchased Electricity
Purchased Electricity emissions are those released during the process of generating the the electricity your organisation purchases. One possible tag would be:
Source - Where does the electricity consumption come from? Which source(s) are causing the highest emissions related to Purchased Electricity? Potential values for this tag could be:
Hosted Servers
Lighting
Electric vehicles
Hybrid vehicles
General office electricity
Scope 3
Purchased Goods and Services
Purchased Goods and Services
Purchased Goods and Services quantifies the emissions occurring during the production of the goods and services you purchase as a company. The following tags are optional columns that already exist in the spend-based calculation method template:
Product category - the idea is that this is the same data you used to come up with your list of matching Plan A categories
Example: you've bought new computer equipment for your office including computer devices, monitors, and keyboards. All of these should be mapped to the Plan A Category 'Computer terminals and other computer peripheral equipment manufacturing'. To break this down further, add the tag 'Product category', and enter the values 'Computer devices', 'Monitors', and 'Keyboards' accordingly. This will allow you retrieve the portion of Office supply emissions coming from each.
Product subcategory - depending on your use case, you might want to distinguish the purchased products (and their associated emissions) even further
Example: If you wanted more granular information on the emissions associated with 'Macbooks' and 'Windows' devices, you could add the tag, 'Product Subcategory', and add these accordingly.
Supplier name - If available, we recommend adding your suppliers' names as an optional tag to your purchased goods and services data, for example, to answer questions like "Which of my suppliers are associated with the most/least emissions?". Note that you can also opt to pseudonymise supplier names. If you do, just make sure to use the same pseudonyms consistently and log these elsewhere.
The following are not included in the downloadable template but can be added as per the above instructions:
Good vs. service - Use this to distinguish which emissions come from goods and which comes services.
Capital Goods
Capital Goods
Purchased Goods and Services quantifies the emissions occurring during the production of the goods and services you purchase as a company. The following tags are optional columns that already exist in the spend-based calculation method template:
Capital Good category - the idea is that this is the same data you used to come up with your list of matching Plan A categories
Example: You run a processing plant with a variety of packaging machinery types, all for which you enter the Plan A category, 'Packaging machinery manufacturing'. You may choose to add a 'Capital Good category' tag for which you enter 'Small product packaging' or 'Large product packaging'.
Capital Good subcategory - depending on your use case, you might want to distinguish the purchased products (and their associated emissions) even further.
Example: you could add a Capital Good sub-category for the individual machine names.
Supplier/Brand name - If available, we recommend adding your suppliers' names as an optional tag to your purchased goods and services data, for example, to answer questions like "Which of my suppliers are associated with the most/least emissions?". Note that you can also opt to pseudonymise supplier names. If you do, just make sure to use the same pseudonyms consistently and log these elsewhere.
The following are not included in the downloadable template but can be added as per the above instructions:
Capital Good family - this could be used to group types of Assets on a higher level than the Plan A category.
Example: Buildings, Machinery, Vehicles
Upstream Transportation and Distribution
Upstream Transportation and Distribution
Upstream Transportation and Distribution emissions refer to emissions arising from the transportation and distribution of goods within the supply chain. One possible tag would be:
Internal/External - are the listed journeys between company-controlled buildings (e.g. between your organisation's factories and warehouses) or external (e.g. from a supplier facility to a company-controlled facility)?
Selected supplier - did your company choose the courier responsible for the transport, or was this the decision of another supplier? Information like this can help you ascertain the emissions you have most control over and help you engage suppliers.
Business Travel
Business Travel
Business Travel emissions are those occurring on business-related trips (other than regular, employee commuting-related emissions), for example to events, conferences, or client meetings.
Note that a lot of business travel characteristics are already required for calculating emissions and can be used for answering a lot of business travel emission-related questions. Nevertheless, here are some ideas for potentially valuable tags:
Business Unit / Team - to measure emissions not only on a facility basis but break them down even further. As always, it depends on your situation and the questions you want to answer.
Project - if most of your Business Travel emissions are related to visiting client sites this tag could help answer the question, "which of our projects cause the most Business Travel emissions?"
Downstream Leased Assets
Downstream Leased Assets
Downstream Leased Assets captures the emissions emerging from the assets you lease to others, such as buildings or vehicles (note that currently only the calculation of emissions from leased combustion-based vehicles is supported on the Plan A platform). Similar to a "Supplier name" tag in Purchased Goods and Services, you could consider adding the following tags:
Lessee / Tenant - Which of your lessees or tenants account for the highest amount of emissions in the category of Downstream Leased Assets? Find out by adding an optional tag to your data.
Asset / Type of Asset - What is it that you lease? It might be determined by the calculation option you choose but a dedicated tag can still be helpful for your emission analysis.