The questionnaire arrives from your biggest customer: "Please provide your Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions for the last financial year." Your company has never counted a kilogram of carbon. The questionnaire has a deadline.
Scope 3 is where small businesses meet climate reporting, usually unwillingly. Here's what it is, why it keeps landing in your inbox, and how to answer it without hiring a consultant.
Your rain jacket, your non-stick pan, your cable insulation, your cosmetics: if it repels water, resists grease or survives heat, there's a decent chance a PFAS compound is doing the work. And there is a proposal on the table in Brussels to restrict them as a class — thousands of substances in one regulatory stroke.
This isn't one of those "maybe someday" initiatives. Five countries submitted a formal restriction proposal to ECHA in early 2023, the scientific committees have delivered their opinions, and the Commission decision is the next step. The backdrop is already public: 3M's $10 billion settlement with US water suppliers over PFAS in drinking water showed what this chemistry costs when regulators move. Small brands that wait for the final text before looking at their supply chains will be redesigning in a hurry.
Take a workshop that buys a second-hand CNC router and fits a better spindle motor itself. Good engineering, sensible money. Under the rules that apply until January 2027, that modification is the workshop's business. Under the Machinery Regulation that replaces them, a modification like that can legally turn the workshop into the machine's manufacturer — with a conformity assessment, a declaration and a CE mark to match.
Regulation (EU) 2023/1230 applies from 20 January 2027, replacing the Machinery Directive that has governed the sector since 2006. Here's what changes and who it catches.
When the EU's GPSR enforcement wave hit marketplace sellers, the pattern repeated itself across the platforms: sellers who'd never thought of themselves as "real businesses" — a woodworker selling children's toys on Etsy, a vintage dealer on eBay — found their listings blocked for missing a responsible person in the EU. Same message, same requirement, same surprise.
The underlying rule of marketplaces: the platform takes the payment and the traffic, but you are the economic operator. The law has applied to individual sellers for years; the platforms started enforcing it recently. Here's what actually applies and what to do about it.
You ship a box of candles to Denver, Portland, Sacramento, Minneapolis and Portland again — the other one, in Maine. Five packages, five states, and now five different extended producer responsibility (EPR) programs that consider you, the brand owner, responsible for what happens to that packaging when the customer is done with it.
US packaging EPR is rolling out state by state, and small brands keep assuming it doesn't apply to them. Sometimes it doesn't — each state has exemptions. But the direction is clear, and California's deadline is the one to put in your calendar right now.
Say you make excellent preserved sauces. For years you've sold through delis and your own website. Then a supermarket chain comes calling — big volume, big excitement — and one line in the contract: "Supplier shall hold a GFSI-recognised certification, such as BRCGS or IFS."
For most food businesses, that's the moment certification stops being optional. Here's what the two standards actually are, what they cost a small producer, and how to pick.
The EU passed a law in 2024 that almost nobody in the SME world has felt yet. It has no reporting duty for small companies. No questionnaire season. No annual filing. And yet it might be the single most expensive EU regulation for any business that sells physical products into the bloc.
Regulation (EU) 2024/3015 bans products made with forced labour from the EU market. It starts applying on 14 December 2027. Here's why a business of any size should treat that date as a deadline, not a footnote.
"Does your company have science-based targets?" If you sell to large organisations, you've seen that line in a tender or onboarding form. Most small companies skip it. A growing number answer it with a validated number, and the gap between the two groups is visible to buyers.
The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) is the body that validates corporate climate targets against what the science says is needed to stay within 1.5°C. And it has a dedicated SME route that a small business can genuinely complete. Here's what it takes.
Two emails land in the same week. A large retail customer asks you to complete an EcoVadis assessment. Another asks you to respond to a CDP climate request. You are a 15-person company with no sustainability manager. Both emails are deadlines.
These two platforms are how big buyers screen suppliers today, and small companies lose business by treating them as optional admin. Here's how they work and how to survive them.
Walk into a bank meeting to renew a credit line these days and you may come out with homework: the credit officer wants to know your climate risks, your emissions and your reduction plan. The reason is less mysterious than it feels. Many banks now report under IFRS S2 themselves, and they need data from their borrowers to do it.
Nobody is going to make a 15-person workshop file IFRS S1. But the standards are becoming the grammar of sustainability data, and your business will be asked to speak it. The short version follows.