Can I claim a carbon credit for selling or recycling my production scrap?

No. Selling or recycling your production scrap does not earn a carbon credit and cannot be subtracted from your footprint. Credits come only from registered, verified projects, and the GHG Protocol keeps avoided emissions outside your inventory totals. The benefit of recycling is counted by whoever uses the recycled material.

Why it is not a carbon credit

A carbon credit comes from a registered project under an approved methodology, shown to be additional and checked by a third-party verifier, then issued by a programme such as Verra or Gold Standard. Selling scrap to a dealer is ordinary business that would happen anyway, so it fails the additionality test before anything else.

A recycler that runs its own registered project may earn credits for it. Those credits belong to the recycler, and you cannot claim a share because you supplied the scrap.

Why you cannot net it off your footprint

The GHG Protocol Corporate Standard counts emissions that occur and says avoided emissions are reported separately, never deducted. The Scope 3 Standard puts the recycling process with the user of the recycled material, so if you subtracted it as well, the same benefit would be counted twice. How scrap shows up in Category 5 is covered on a separate page linked below.

Instruments people confuse with credits

• Plastic EPR certificates in India are generated by registered recyclers on the CPCB portal and used by producers to meet recycling obligations. They are a compliance instrument for plastic, not tonnes of CO2, and they are not yours to sell as a scrap generator.
• Recycled content claims belong to the buyer of the material, in its own product footprint.
• Scrap revenue lowers your product cost, not your emissions.

What you can truthfully tell a buyer

1. Tonnes of scrap sent for recycling each year, backed by weighbridge slips and the recycler's receipts.
2. Your scrap rate and how it is falling. Less scrap per good unit means less material bought and processed, which does cut your emissions.
3. If you want to mention avoided emissions, give them as a separate figure with method and source, clearly outside your Scope 1, 2 and 3 totals.
4. In a product footprint under ISO 14067, say whether you use a cut-off or an end-of-life recycling approach; with cut-off, the recycling benefit goes to the material's next user.

What Senseible does here

Senseible reads the freight records for trips that move your scrap and keeps those lines in the Scope 3 evidence trail, with the source file behind each figure. It issues no carbon credits, so it will not turn scrap sales into one.

• Recycled content in a product footprint
• Does scrap count as zero under CBAM?
• Plastic EPR recycled content targets
• Scrap sold for recycling in Scope 3

Sources: GHG Protocol Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Standard, Category 5, GHG Protocol Corporate Standard, ISO 14067:2018, Carbon footprint of products (iso.org)

Last reviewed 2026-10-17.