There's a really good explanation of different loopholes in calculating carbon emissions in the Microsoft carbon target announcement from last year[1]. Eg do you count secondary services your employees use, like food services or emissions from their commute? Do you count partner services, like shipping providers for physical product? These, along with your direct emissions, are categorized into three "scopes" of emis…
> do you count secondary services your employees use No, you don't. If you pull the food service thread, you can go through the food wholesalers to farmers, then to John Deere, then to steel plants, then to miners, then to hard hats and eventually you'll end up in China where the game will be declared lost.
It is commonly done. I work for John deere and we have a team dedicated to making sure that our products don't use conflict minerals, which if I understand correctly means mined with slave labor. I know for a fact that we have all of our suppliers traced 6 levels deep just to ensure that the whole chain is okay. We can put whatever want on the list, though we sometimes run into problems because we are too small to get any chip maker to care. (electronics are about the only thing that we are small players in, our list is in general common with the likes of GM so there is a lot of pressure potential suppliers for must stuff)