32 | Plant & Works Engineering www.pwemag.co.uk August/September 2026 Special Focus NET ZERO Three years ago, sustainability lived on a slide near the back of the annual report. Now it shows up in the first ten minutes of the board meeting, usually as a question about compliance risk, and usually from a director who’s genuinely worried. Here’s why that shift happened: sustainability stopped being voluntary. Europe’s reporting directive, the EU’s carbon border tax and a wave of disclosure mandates in the United States have turned a reputational nicety into a reporting obligation with real financial teeth. California’s SB 253 alone now carries penalties of up to $500,000 a year for noncompliance. If you make things for a living, this affects you. And it affects you sooner than you probably think. Prashanth Mysore, Senior Director for Strategic Business Development at DELMIA, explores in more detail. A few figures set the stage: 70–90% of a typical manufacturer’s footprint sits in Scope 3—the supply chain and product use. 26? is how much larger supply chain emissions are, on average, than a company’s own operations. $335B is the carbon liability implied by recent upstream emissions across manufacturing, retail and materials. These aren’t abstract. They tell you where to spend your attention before you spend a single dollar. The real problem most manufacturers have The pattern repeats everywhere. A manufacturer commits to a public net zero target with a date attached. Marketing is happy. The CEO gets a nice quote in a trade publication. Then someone in operations is handed the target and quickly realizes the company has no idea where its emissions actually come from. That’s the true starting point for most firms. Not a lack of ambition. A lack of data. You can’t reduce what you can’t measure. Yet most manufacturers measure carbon the way a child measures height—standing against a wall once a year and hoping for the best. Annual estimates built from utility bills are fine for a glossy report. They’re useless for running a decarbonization program, because they tell you nothing about which machine, line, shift or supplier is driving the number. The companies winning here treat emissions data the way they treat quality or throughput data: continuous, granular and tied to the physical process. That shift, from annual estimate to operational signal, is the whole game. Where your emissions really live If you remember one thing, make it this. For a typical manufacturer, 70 to 90% of the carbon footprint sits in Scope 3—your supply chain and the use of your product after it leaves the dock. This is uncomfortable, because Scope 3 is Sustainability has crossed from a voluntary reputational concern into a hard regulatory obligation backed by real penalties, and with 70 to 90% of your footprint hidden in mandates. The manufacturers who treat emissions as an operational discipline rather than a reporting chore will be the ones still standing when the deadlines arrive. Prashanth Mysore, Senior Director for Strategic Business Development at DELMIA, reports. How can manufacturers navigate new ESG Regulations to achieve Net Zero?
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