Our IT services page covers who asks IT firms for carbon figures and what an IT footprint contains. This post is for managed service providers in particular, because two things set them apart: they resell hardware, and their customers want a figure for "our share".
The five questions, and where the answers come from
| Customer asks | Where the answer comes from |
|---|---|
| Do you have a Carbon Reduction Plan and a net zero target? | Your published PPN 006 plan |
| What are your Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions? | Your annual footprint |
| What are the emissions of the service you provide to us? | An allocation of your footprint (below) |
| Where is our data hosted, and on what power? | Your data centre or cloud provider's own sustainability reporting |
| What happens to hardware at end of life? | Your WEEE recycling and refurbishment records |
A worked example
A 25-person MSP with an office, two engineers' vans and a hybrid team, with illustrative figures and 2026 factors:
| Source | Scope | kg CO2e |
|---|---|---|
| Office electricity, 20,000 kWh | 2 | 2,619 |
| Office gas, 15,000 kWh | 1 | 2,735 |
| Engineers' van diesel, 4,000 litres | 1 | 10,334 |
| Homeworking, 25 staff two days a week | 3 (category 7) | 5,588 |
| Hosting and colocation services, £60,000 | 3 (category 1) | 4,793 |
| Software licences and IT services bought in, £40,000 | 3 (category 1) | 3,997 |
| Laptops and network kit resold to customers, £150,000 | 3 (category 1) | 80,462 |
Scope 1 and 2 come to 15.69 tonnes. Scope 3 comes to 94.84 tonnes, and 80.46 of that is the resold hardware. Hosting, software and resale are spend-based estimates using Defra's multipliers, so treat them as rough and improve the biggest with supplier figures over time.
Strictly, the electricity those resold devices use over their lives is Scope 3 category 11, use of sold products. A PPN 006 plan doesn't require it. If you leave it out of a fuller footprint, say so.
"What's our share?"
Customers ask this because your emissions are part of their Scope 3. The GHG Protocol's Scope 3 standard describes economic allocation, splitting emissions by the money value of what each customer receives, and for a service business it is a practical choice. In the example, a customer paying £120,000 a year out of £2,400,000 turnover is 5.0% of revenue, so:
- Their share of your Scope 1 and 2 is 0.78 tonnes.
- Hardware you sold them is added on its own, from what they bought, not spread across every customer.
If a customer's service uses much more of your resources than average, for example dedicated servers in your own racks, say so and adjust. For the related question of cloud versus on-premises servers, see our post on counting and cutting IT emissions.
Answering in a questionnaire
Some customers send these questions through a platform rather than by email. Our posts on CDP supply chain requests and EcoVadis carbon questions cover those formats. Whatever the format, give location-based Scope 2, add market-based if you're on a renewable tariff, and state the factor year.
How Carbon Recycling helps
The free questionnaire answer bank writes model answers to the questions customers ask most, including a revenue-share answer to "what's our share", from your own figures. In the app, upload your purchase ledger or connect Xero, QuickBooks, Sage or FreeAgent and Carbon Recycling suggests a Defra multiplier for hosting, software and hardware accounts, alongside your bills, vans and the government homeworking factor. It produces your Carbon Reduction Plan in the PPN 006 format. And you can connect an AI assistant such as Claude or ChatGPT to read your figures when you're filling in a long questionnaire.