Every freight invoice now has a carbon price. Can you show the calculation?

Your customers are asking for verified emissions data. The EU ETS is pricing the carbon cost of every freight movement. The logistics companies that get this right first will win the contracts the others lose.

Book a demo

Trusted by

Elekta logo white
pod-point
Spandex logo
Hitachi Logo in white
Reform Logo

Normative for logistics

As EU ETS surcharges appear on freight invoices and shipper procurement teams demand verified emissions data, logistics companies face carbon obligations that run across every depot, carrier, and subsidiary in their network.

At the same time, CSRD is extending Scope 3 reporting obligations through the logistics value chain — shippers, not just carriers, are becoming accountable for transport emissions in their own annual disclosures.

Normative provides the carbon accounting infrastructure for logistics operations: multi-entity consolidation, methodology consistency, and the expert support to build an inventory that holds up when a shipper, an auditor, or an SBTi reviewer asks to see the calculation.

Impacts

Logistics generates a significant amount of carbon, but accounting for those emissions is particularly challenging.

January 2026

The EU Emissions Trading System reached 100% CO₂ coverage — every vessel over 5,000 gross tonnes trading to or from EU ports now has a carbon cost attached to every voyage

€60–150/ton

The EU ETS carbon price in 2026, translating to €1.3 million in annual EU ETS costs for an average bulk vessel — already appearing as surcharges on freight invoices

8–12%

Freight cost increase on Europe-Asia and Europe-North America trade lanes as EU ETS surcharges pass through from carriers to shippers

Barriers to accurate carbon reporting

For most of the last decade, carbon reporting in logistics was a disclosure exercise. That has changed on three fronts simultaneously.

EU ETS is pricing every freight movement. 100% CO₂ coverage from January 2026 means every vessel trading to or from EU ports carries a carbon cost on every voyage — already appearing as a surcharge line on freight invoices. Shippers are now asking, before they agree to pay: show me the calculation.

Shipper procurement is asking for the calculation. CSRD is extending Scope 3 obligations through the logistics value chain. The emissions data request from one customer this year arrives from five next year, and from procurement teams, investors, and regulators the year after that.

Multi-entity logistics data does not consolidate itself. Carbon data arrives from fuel records across ten countries, carrier invoices in three currencies, and local energy accounts managed by people who have never heard of the GHG Protocol. Most carbon accounting approaches were not designed for this.

The logistics companies building this capability now are doing it because carbon data is becoming a condition of doing business.

Book a demo
Cargo ship

Why Normative

  • Multi-entity, multi-country consolidation

    Logistics carbon data is distributed across subsidiaries, depots, and carrier records in formats that rarely match. Normative consolidates Scope 1, 2, and 3 data from distributed entities and local data owners into a single, auditable carbon inventory. Dimension tagging lets you separate, combine, or filter by subsidiary, country, or business unit — so the group-level number and the entity-level number are always derived from the same calculation, with no manual reconciliation.

  • Methodology you can defend year after year

    When you report to CDP one year and SBTi the next, and your methodology shifts between them, your numbers do not tell a consistent story. Every Normative calculation carries the emission factor version, the data source, and the methodology decision that produced it — documented as the inventory is built, not reconstructed before submission. When an auditor asks why your Scope 3 number moved, the answer is already in the system.

  • SBTi targets built around logistics metrics

    Logistics companies setting Science-Based Targets cannot use revenue or headcount as their intensity metric. The operationally meaningful metric is throughput: pallet positions, tonne-kilometres, shipment volumes. Normative builds SBTi targets around the metrics your operations team already tracks — with a 100% SBTi approval rate across every customer submission.

Carbon accounting for logistics

Cargo containers at a loading dock

Sustainability

16. Dec 2022

The business benefits of carbon accounting

Legislation

26. Oct 2023

Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), explained

Sustainability

20. Apr 2023

How to reduce supplier carbon emissions

Carbon insights to drive proactive decision-making

  • Comprehensive carbon calculation
  • Expert support
  • Audit and compliance-ready
Book a demo