What ±50% uncertainty costs:

For a company with 10,000 tCO2e Scope 3, a spend-based estimate carries ±5,000 tCO2e of unaccounted exposure. At €65/tCO2e in EU ETS, that is ±€325,000 in potential carbon cost. ESRS E1 requires companies to disclose methodology quality — spend-based data must be justified. EPD-first, activity-based calculation delivers <10% uncertainty and meets CSRD assurance expectations.

How Simple handles CSRD, EU ETS and CBAM

EPDs and supplier PCFs come first — where suppliers provide verified product-level data, Simple ingests it and ties it directly to the invoice line. For CBAM-covered goods (steel, cement, fertilisers, aluminium), supplier PCFs replace default embedded-emissions values and reduce CBAM certificate costs.

Where no EPD exists, Simple applies activity-based calculation using ecoinvent and recognised European LCA databases, with geography- and technology-specific factors. For EU ETS facilities, invoice-level activity data is mapped to ETS source categories — generating MRV-compatible data exports alongside ESRS E1 Scope 3 figures.

Every factor is versioned for period-consistent CSRD re-calculation. As factor databases update, Simple's re-mapping automatically improves historical and future calculations — supporting the shift from limited to reasonable assurance.

Spend-based estimates are never silently applied — any lower-precision proxy is flagged explicitly in the output with the reason noted, satisfying ESRS E1's methodology quality disclosure requirement.