Worthington Enterprises' First Scope 3 Disclosure Reveals Where an Industrial Manufacturer's Real Carbon Footprint Lives

For years, corporate sustainability reports have leaned heavily on a company's own smokestacks and electricity bills: the emissions a business can measure most easily, control most directly, and reduce with the clearest line of sight. Worthington Enterprises, the Columbus, Ohio-based manufacturer of pressure cylinders, HVAC components, metal building products and consumer tools, followed that pattern for years too. Its newly published 2026 Corporate Citizenship and Sustainability Report, covering the fiscal year from June 1, 2025 through May 31, 2026, changes that. For the first time, Worthington has disclosed a full Scope 3 value-chain emissions inventory alongside its Scope 1 and Scope 2 figures. The numbers are a useful reminder of something the sustainability accounting world has argued for years but that rarely gets illustrated this cleanly: for a company that makes things out of steel, the real carbon story is not inside its own walls.

What Scope 1, 2 and 3 Actually Cover

Under the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard, which Worthington uses as its reporting framework, emissions are split into three scopes. Scope 1 covers direct emissions from sources the company owns or controls, such as fuel burned in its own furnaces, ovens and vehicles. Scope 2 covers indirect emissions from the electricity, steam or heat it purchases to run its facilities. Scope 3 covers everything else in the value chain — emissions embedded in the goods and services it buys, the transportation of materials to and from its plants, the commuting of its employees, and, further downstream, the emissions generated when customers use and eventually dispose of its products. Scope 3 is optional under many disclosure regimes and notoriously difficult to calculate, which is why a large share of companies that report Scope 1 and Scope 2 each year still leave Scope 3 blank, partial, or several years stale. Worthington's FY26 report is explicit that this is new ground for the company: its own environmental data tables show dashes for Scope 3 in fiscal 2024 and 2025, with a note directing readers to the company's CDP responses for those years instead. In other words, FY26 is effectively Worthington's first true, comprehensive Scope 3 baseline.

The Scale of the Gap

The scale of what that baseline reveals is striking. Worthington's Scope 1 emissions for FY26 came to 41,848 metric tons of CO2-equivalent, and its Scope 2 emissions came to 45,683 tCO2e on a market-adjusted basis (44,565 tCO2e on a location-based basis, which reflects the average emissions intensity of the regional electricity grids where its facilities sit rather than the specific contracts it holds). Added together, those two scopes — the emissions most companies report first and often report only — total roughly 87,500 tCO2e. Scope 3, by contrast, adds up to approximately 572,500 tCO2e across the ten value-chain categories Worthington disclosed. That means Scope 3 accounts for close to 87 percent of Worthington's total carbon footprint, with direct operations and purchased energy together making up barely 13 percent. Put differently: for every ton of carbon dioxide Worthington's own factories and purchased power produce, its supply chain and product life cycle produce nearly seven more.

The single largest line item by a wide margin is purchased goods and services, which Worthington reports at 402,409 tCO2e for FY26. That one category alone is larger than every other emissions source in the company's inventory combined — larger than Scope 1 and Scope 2 together, and larger than the other nine Scope 3 categories combined. It represents roughly 70 percent of Worthington's total Scope 3 footprint and about 61 percent of its entire carbon footprint across all three scopes. For a company whose core business is forming and finishing steel into pressure cylinders, tanks, roofing components and structural products, this is not a surprising result in the abstract — steelmaking is one of the most carbon-intensive industrial processes in the world, and a metals fabricator's biggest climate lever is very often the metal itself rather than the factory that shapes it. What is notable is that Worthington has now put a number on it, and that number dwarfs everything the company measures inside its own operating footprint.

Green Steel: A Concrete First Step

That context makes one of the report's product-innovation stories read differently than it might on its own. Worthington discloses that it has begun manufacturing pressure cylinders using low-carbon steel produced by ArcelorMittal through a renewable-energy-based process, and that switching to this steel cuts the embedded carbon dioxide emissions of the affected cylinders by 73 percent compared with traditionally produced steel. The report describes Worthington as the first company to manufacture pressure cylinders using this renewably produced steel. Framed in the report primarily as a product and engineering milestone, it also happens to be the clearest lever visible anywhere in the report against the single biggest number in the company's own emissions inventory — the steel it buys. Worthington does not explicitly connect the two in its disclosure; the low-carbon steel initiative sits in the Products section of the report, while the 402,409-tonne purchased-goods figure sits in the Process & Planet section, and the report never draws a direct line between them or quantifies what share of purchased-goods emissions the low-carbon steel program currently offsets. That gap between a genuinely significant product-level decarbonization step and an explicit value-chain emissions strategy is worth noting for anyone reading the report closely: the ingredients for a purchased-goods reduction narrative are there, but Worthington has not yet assembled them into one.

A second, related initiative sits alongside the steel story. Worthington's Ragasco composite cylinder business has launched what the report calls the Cylinder Collective, a program to recover and reuse materials from composite gas cylinders at end of life through a thermal recovery process, with a statewide pilot now operating in Connecticut. Composite cylinders are lighter than steel ones and have their own embedded-carbon profile tied to the resins and fibers used to make them; a recovery and reuse pathway for those materials is a direct response to the "end-of-life treatment of sold products" category in the Scope 3 inventory, where Worthington reports 23,768 tCO2e for FY26. The company also discloses that its Ragasco business has begun producing environmental product declarations and offers a carbon footprint calculator for its composite cylinders — the kind of granular, product-level carbon accounting that, if extended across more of Worthington's portfolio, would eventually let the company attach real numbers to initiatives like this one rather than describing them qualitatively.

The Rest of the Value Chain

The remaining Scope 3 categories round out a picture of a fairly typical durable-goods manufacturer's value chain, once the outsized purchased-goods figure is set aside. "Use of sold products" — the emissions generated when Worthington's customers actually use what the company makes, relevant for products like HVAC components and heating and cooking cylinders that consume energy in the field — comes to 72,673 tCO2e, the second-largest Scope 3 category after purchased goods. Upstream transportation and distribution, covering the movement of raw materials and components into Worthington's plants, adds 22,363 tCO2e. Fuel- and energy-related activities not already captured in Scope 1 or 2 — essentially the upstream emissions of producing the fuel and electricity Worthington itself consumes — contribute 16,969 tCO2e. Employee commuting adds 12,655 tCO2e, investments (a category that typically applies to a company's financial holdings and joint ventures rather than its operations) add 11,035 tCO2e, downstream transportation and distribution of finished products to customers adds 5,082 tCO2e, business travel adds 3,149 tCO2e, and waste generated in Worthington's own operations adds a comparatively small 2,391 tCO2e. Worthington's report notes that five of the fifteen standard GHG Protocol Scope 3 categories — capital goods, upstream leased assets, processing of sold products, downstream leased assets, and franchises — were excluded either because they are not applicable to the business or because they are already captured within other reported categories, a fairly standard scoping decision for an industrial manufacturer of this type.

Methodology, Assurance and What's Missing

On methodology, Worthington states that it calculated its Scope 3 emissions using primary data where it was available, supplemented by supplier-specific data and standard emissions factors drawn from CDP, the UK's DEFRA database, the U.S. EPA, and environmentally extended input-output (EEIO) models, depending on what was appropriate to each category. That mixed approach — part supplier-reported, part modeled — is standard practice for first-year Scope 3 inventories, since very few companies can get primary, verified data from every supplier and downstream customer in year one. The report references an assurance letter covering its greenhouse gas calculations but does not reproduce that letter's contents or scope within the document itself, so readers cannot tell from the report alone exactly which figures carry third-party assurance and which do not — a common limitation in first-year value-chain disclosures, but one worth flagging for readers who want to weigh the numbers' reliability.

What the report does not yet contain is any emissions-reduction target that explicitly covers Scope 3. Worthington's stated climate goals — cutting Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions by 60 percent from a fiscal 2024 baseline by 2034, and reaching net-zero Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2050 — apply only to the roughly 13 percent of the company's footprint it directly controls. The 87 percent of emissions now disclosed as Scope 3 has no comparable target attached to it in this report. That is not unusual for a company in its first year of full Scope 3 disclosure; setting a credible reduction target for value-chain emissions typically requires at least a year or two of consistent measurement to establish a reliable baseline and trend line, which Worthington now has the beginning of. But it does mean the headline decarbonization commitments in this report cover only a small fraction of what the report's own data shows to be the company's actual footprint.

Intensity Metrics and Governance

Two intensity figures in the report put the absolute numbers in useful proportion. Worthington discloses a combined Scope 1 and Scope 2 GHG emissions intensity of 0.063 tCO2e per $1,000 of revenue on both a location-based and market-based basis, alongside an overall energy intensity of 0.895 gigajoules per $1,000 of revenue. The company does not disclose an equivalent intensity figure for Scope 3, and without a stated FY26 revenue figure in the report itself, readers cannot independently translate the 572,500-tonne Scope 3 total into a comparable per-dollar metric — a gap that, once Worthington has a second or third year of Scope 3 data to compare against, would let it show whether value-chain emissions are growing in line with the business, faster than it, or, ideally, more slowly. On the governance side, the report says climate-related financial risk is assessed through Worthington's enterprise risk management system, and credits that process with helping the company avoid roughly $2.2 million in costs over three years, though it does not specify how that figure was calculated or which categories of risk it covers. Inside its own operations, Worthington's Environmental Excellence program — an ISO 14001-based environmental management system paired with software the company calls WEEMS for data collection and incident reporting — is now active at 11 of Worthington's manufacturing locations, with two sites, both in Raufoss, Norway, holding formal ISO 14001 and ISO 50001 certification. That operational infrastructure is what generates the Scope 1 and Scope 2 numbers with reasonable precision each year; nothing comparable yet exists on the Scope 3 side, where the report leans instead on supplier data and modeled emissions factors.

Supply Chain Engagement

Where the report does show forward motion on the value-chain side is in supply chain engagement infrastructure rather than emissions targets specifically. Worthington describes roughly 300 suppliers engaged annually, with all suppliers covered by some form of indirect data collection and 54 percent engaged directly, including 100 percent of suppliers the company classifies as high-risk — defined as either non-domestic suppliers or those representing the top 80 percent of spend. Domestic U.S. suppliers account for 85 percent of Worthington's supplier spending, a detail relevant to both the company's transportation-related emissions and its broader supply chain risk profile. The report sets a target of implementing a formal Supply Chain Sustainability Management Program by the end of fiscal 2026 and engaging 100 percent of its strategic global supply chain — defined as high-risk and high-spend suppliers combined — by the end of fiscal 2027. One packaging supplier, Veritiv, is highlighted for introducing a recycled-PET packaging solution that the report says reduces both energy use and greenhouse gas emissions during production, achieving 50 to 60 percent recycled content in the plastic packaging it supplies to Worthington. These are the building blocks of a supplier-side decarbonization program, even though the report stops short of quantifying what emissions reduction they are expected to deliver or tying them explicitly to the purchased-goods total.

A Pattern Across Heavy Industry

Worthington's experience is a useful case study precisely because it is not unusual. Across heavy industry and manufacturing, Scope 3 emissions routinely dwarf Scope 1 and Scope 2 combined, for the same structural reason visible in Worthington's numbers: the carbon cost of producing raw steel, aluminum, plastics and other purchased materials is generally far higher than the carbon cost of cutting, welding, forming and coating those materials into finished products. Disclosure regimes are increasingly catching up to that reality — the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and evolving frameworks from bodies like the ISSB are pushing more companies toward comprehensive value-chain disclosure, and investors and customers alike are starting to ask harder questions about embedded emissions rather than just operational ones. Worthington's decision to publish a full Scope 3 inventory this year, even without a Scope 3 target to match it, puts real numbers on the table that can now be tracked, scrutinized and, in future years, measured against a trend line. The company's CEO, Joe Hayek, frames the broader sustainability program in the report as a matter of "measured momentum" and "steady, meaningful progress, grounded in discipline, accountability and continuous improvement" — language that, applied to the Scope 3 disclosure specifically, describes where Worthington sits today: a first, transparent baseline, a handful of genuinely promising product-level decarbonization initiatives already underway in low-carbon steel and cylinder recovery, and a value-chain emissions target that has not yet been written.

What happens over the next two fiscal years will say a good deal about whether this first disclosure becomes the start of a genuine value-chain decarbonization program or stays a one-time accounting exercise. Worthington has already committed to two concrete, dated milestones that touch its supply chain directly: finishing its Supply Chain Sustainability Management Program by the end of FY26, and engaging its full strategic supplier base — the high-risk and high-spend suppliers who between them likely account for a large share of that 402,409-tonne purchased-goods figure — by the end of FY27. Neither milestone is explicitly framed in the report as an emissions target, but both create the data infrastructure a real one would require. A second consecutive year of Scope 3 disclosure would also let Worthington do something it cannot yet do: show whether the number is moving, and in which direction, rather than presenting a single snapshot. For a company whose value-chain emissions are nearly seven times its direct footprint, that trend line, once it exists, may end up mattering more to investors, customers and regulators than any other figure in the report.

Why It Matters

Worthington's numbers are a useful stand-in for a problem the entire heavy-manufacturing sector shares. Steel, cement, aluminum and other primary materials carry most of the embodied carbon in almost anything built from them, which means a metals fabricator can hit every operational target it sets — cleaner electricity, less waste, safer plants — and still leave the great majority of its footprint untouched. That is exactly what Worthington's own data shows: an 87 percent Scope 3 share against a Scope 1 and 2 target that only reaches the remaining 13 percent. The green steel cylinders are proof this is solvable at the product level, not just a talking point — a 73 percent cut in embedded carbon is real and available today. What is missing is the connective tissue between that kind of innovation and an enterprise-wide strategy: a target, a timeline, and a plan for scaling low-carbon material sourcing across the portfolio rather than one product line. That gap is where the real story is for any hard-to-abate manufacturer reading this report, Worthington included — not whether the technology exists, but whether the strategy will catch up to it.