Planet Mark certification — and the unpublished rule

This is the distinction most likely to be misread in a tender response, and it is the clearest sentence in the whole scheme. Core Scope 3 sources are collected, calculated and reported. They are excluded from the test that awards the certificate.

“We will continue to measure ‘core’ Scope 3 emissions sources, but Members will not certify on reductions to core Scope 3 emissions.”

In practice the core sources are a defined subset. A representative certification report lists Category 1 purchased goods and services (partial), Category 3 fuel and energy related activities (partial), Category 5 waste, Category 6 business travel and Category 7 employee commuting (partial). Three of those five are explicitly marked partial.

That is a normal and honest position for an SME-facing scheme. Full Scope 3 is expensive and most first-year members cannot produce it. Planet Mark says as much: Business Certification is “the best first step towards the ultimate goal of reaching net zero”, and members “will need to understand and report against their full emissions boundary” to progress.

The deadline for that is 2030, by which members must measure a full inventory footprint across Scope 1, 2 and extended Scope 3.

Until then, a Planet Mark certificate is evidence of a reduction in direct emissions and purchased energy. It is not evidence of a reduction in supply-chain emissions, and a procurement team reading it as the latter is reading something the scheme does not claim.

The reduction is not measured against a fixed starting year. Planet Mark’s reports state the mechanism plainly: “Annual reductions are based on the previous year’s emissions (a rolling baseline), with certification awarded based on a minimum normalised reduction requirement or the emissions banking approach.”

Each year’s footprint becomes next year’s baseline. Cuts do not accumulate against 2015; they reset annually.

Two consequences follow, and neither is hidden. A rolling baseline gets harder every year, because each 5% comes off an already-reduced number — that is the argument for it. It also means a certificate says nothing about the total distance travelled since a company started, only about the last twelve months.

Normalisation is the second mechanism. The requirement can be met on an intensity metric — per employee, or per unit of turnover — rather than in absolute tonnes. Planet Mark’s reports carry the caveat themselves: “Improvements in data quality and changes to the business reporting boundary may impact the emission sources included in each year’s certification. Meaningful comparisons, therefore, may not be possible without normalisation.”

Emissions banking is the third: over-achievement in one year can be carried and drawn on in a later one.

All three are legitimate scheme-design choices, and the reports document them. But together they mean the sentence “this company reduced its emissions by 5% to recertify” can be true in a year when the tonnes went up.

One published certification report makes the mechanism concrete, and it is worth setting out because the report itself is entirely transparent about every number in it.

The certificate was awarded “for reducing measured Scope 1 and 2 emissions (location-based) by a 6.6% per turnover metric reduction in location based compared to the previous year”.

The same document, four pages later: “Total market-based emissions have increased by 87.5% year-on-year, primarily due to a significant increase in building emissions.” Electricity emissions rose 270.4%; the measured footprint went from 1,242.1 to 2,329.5 tonnes.

Both statements are true, and the report prints them side by side without evasion. The certificate turns on a normalised, per-turnover, location-based Scope 1 and 2 comparison. The 87.5% increase is absolute and market-based — and market-based is the basis Planet Mark has just made its default display method.

Nothing here is a criticism of the member, who published the report, or of Planet Mark, which wrote it. It is an illustration of what a normalised intensity test measures.

It is what any intensity metric does: it holds performance constant against a business that grew. That is a defensible thing to certify. It is not the thing most people reading the logo on a tender document believe they are being told.

Planet Mark restructured its membership in January 2025 into the Net Zero Certification Programme: four certification levels, served by five paid membership packages. In Planet Mark’s own words, the four are these.

Planet Mark Certified – Business, which establishes the baseline. Then Net Zero Committed, Net Zero Aligned, and Net Zero Achieved.

Net Zero Committed requires near-term and long-term targets and a transition plan. Net Zero Aligned is reached when annual progress reports show the near-term targets being met. Net Zero Achieved requires the long-term targets to be met and residual emissions neutralised “with carbon removal offsets”.

The fifth package is Business Certification (Advanced), which sits alongside the first level rather than above it, and exists to measure the full Scope 3 footprint that standard Business Certification does not.

Existing members were not grandfathered: “Existing members will be invited to transition onto a membership package at your next renewal date.”

The levels are the scheme’s answer to a real problem — that “certified” meant the same thing for a company at year one and a company at year ten. A tender response that says “Planet Mark certified” without naming the level is now materially less informative than one that names it.

A buyer trying to work out what the first certificate actually includes will find Planet Mark answering the question two ways, on pages served from the same site on the same day.

The programme page: level one is where “we will support you to measure your Scope 1, Scope 2 and Scope 3 carbon emissions”.

The get-certified page and the membership landing page: “With the Business Certification membership package, we will support you to measure your Scope 1 and Scope 2 carbon emissions” — and, separately, “our Business Certification (Advanced) membership package is designed to measure your full carbon footprint including all Scope 3 categories”.

Those cannot both be right, and the difference is not academic: on the second reading, Scope 3 is a paid upgrade. The member reports resolve it in a third direction again — core Scope 3 sources are measured under standard Business Certification, but partially, and not certified on.

The consistent thread across all three is the one that matters: the certificate is awarded on Scope 1 and 2 either way.

Anyone budgeting for this should establish in writing, before signing, which Scope 3 categories are in scope of their package, whether they are full or partial, and what the upgrade costs. Planet Mark quotes on annual turnover and required support, so there is no published price list to check it against.

Everything that follows is a criticism of publication, not of the certification. The distinction matters enough to state before making the criticisms.

Planet Mark runs a numerical reduction test on GHG Protocol data, issues a report that shows its working, publishes the caveats about normalisation and boundary change in the report itself, and withdraws the mark from members who do not reduce. That is more than most voluntary marks require and considerably more than a self-declared pledge.

None of the findings on this page were dug out of anything. Every one of them is on a page Planet Mark serves publicly, or in a report a member chose to publish.

Nor is anything here a claim that Planet Mark has misrepresented itself. A scheme that changes its rules will always have older material in circulation, and the pages carrying the stale figures are marketing collateral rather than scheme documents.

The narrow complaint is this: the operative rule is not published, and what is published contradicts it. A prospective member reading planetmark.com on 10 September 2026 is told the requirement is 2.5% of the whole footprint. It is 5% of Scope 1 and 2 from year three. They cannot find that out until they are a member, because the Code of Practice is not public either.

Every criticism from here is sourced to Planet Mark’s own words, or to the body that owns the standard being named.