Short answer: yes. Every business has an environmental impact — mainly through what it buys and spends. This applies regardless of whether you provide services, work with contractors, or manufacture nothing at all.
Service Businesses
Service businesses often assume their environmental footprint is minimal, but day-to-day operations generate significant emissions through spending. Examples of businesses this applies to:
• Consulting and professional services firms
• Software companies and digital agencies
• Financial services and accounting practices
• Marketing, design, and creative studios
What matters for emissions calculations is your operational activity — the energy you use, the services you buy, the travel your team takes, and the goods and services you purchase. For SMEs, Green Project calculates your emissions from your existing financial records, converting spend data into emissions estimates using industry emission factors and market pricing data. Physical production is not a prerequisite for any of this.
What if Most of Our Costs Are Salaries or Contractor Payments?
Many service businesses assume their impact is minimal because their largest costs are people-related. However, the operational spending that sits alongside salaries still creates measurable environmental impact:
• Technology services & software: Cloud tools, SaaS subscriptions, and digital infrastructure rely on energy-intensive data centres.
• Office supplies: Even minimal quantities carry manufacturing and shipping impacts.
• Professional services: Purchased services — IT support, accountancy, legal — carry their own environmental footprints.
Focus your reporting on these operational expenses. They are smaller than salaries, but they are the key to understanding and managing your environmental impact — and analysing them often reveals opportunities to reduce both costs and emissions.
What About Businesses That Don’t Make Physical Products?
Physical production is not a prerequisite for emissions reporting. Service businesses have significant environmental impacts through:
Office operations and utilities: Energy for heating, cooling, lighting, and day-to-day activity.
Business travel and commuting: Air, rail, and road travel for employees and clients.
Purchased services and supplies: Everything from outsourced functions to office consumables.
Technology and equipment: Devices, servers, and the cloud services that power your work.
All of these contribute to your Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions footprint, and all are captured through your existing spending records.
“But we’re different…”
Every business hears this objection internally. The reality is that spend-based emissions reporting is specifically designed to work for businesses of all types, including those without factories, fleets, or physical inventory.