If you are a large exporter of automobiles or auto components, how would you keep a record of the emissions from every activity of your suppliers — and their suppliers?
Climate action imperatives — such as Europe’s ‘carbon border adjustment mechanism’ (CBAM) — will force exporters to keep track of their products’ carbon footprint to secure business.
Gurgaon-based startup OnlyGood FutureTech offers to help companies maintain a record of their Scope-3 emissions (resulting from supply chain activities). Founded in 2022, the company has created a cloud-based technology platform for ‘automated supply chain carbon tracking’.
Vivek Mehra, co-founder, says the platform currently services around 80 companies (it recently onboarded Pune-based Blue Ocean Steels). These companies have thousands of suppliers, whose emissions are to be measured and recorded.
OnlyGood does this by “inviting” the suppliers onto its platform (for free). It helps the suppliers enter their Scope 1 (direct emissions) and Scope-2 (emissions from energy sellers) data and initiate their own sustainability dashboard. As suppliers enter their carbon data, the parent enterprise’s Scope-3 emissions record is automatically updated.
Auditable data
The parent enterprise can rank suppliers based on carbon intensities and level of ‘greenness’. The OnlyGood platform ensures the veracity of the carbon emissions record by maintaining supporting documents such as invoices and readings and timestamps from IoT devices (such as energy meters). All data and reports are verifiable and auditable by third-party agencies like SGS and Bureau Veritas. If an enterprise turns carbon negative, it may also use OnlyGood’s reports to earn carbon credits, Mehra said.
The biggest challenge is in addressing suppliers’ privacy concerns and fears over exposure of transgressions such as groundwater overuse. However, they come on board when they see the business that carbon-compliance can fetch, he says.
OnlyGood is part of the joint incubator led by IIT-Madras Incubated Cell, which is also one of the investors, and Daimler India Commercial Vehicles, which is one of the clients.