Accelerate & Transform
Cut carbon, keep the margin
Where in the chain does carbon come out without the margin going with it?
Where in the chain does carbon come out without the margin going with it?
The target is public. A number of tonnes, a year, a logo on the annual report. The plan to reach it is a list of projects, each with a cost. The finance team has already done the sum: at current prices, the plan comes out of the margin for years before the first tonne is saved. So the programme advances at the speed of the budget cycle, one project a year, while the customers who asked for the target keep asking for the data.
Decarbonisation is no longer optional for the chain. It is still booked as a cost. The procurement team is told to buy greener and cheaper in the same breath. The sales team is asked whether clients will pay for low-carbon and answers that it has not asked them. The sustainability team defends a budget line with a report. Each of them is right, and the margin is still the thing that gives.
Where the carbon comes out, in what order and who pays for each step; whether to decarbonise was settled when the target was signed.
A supply chain carries carbon in a few dozen places and margin in a few others. The two maps rarely overlap. Some tonnes are expensive to remove and go unnoticed downstream. Some are cheap and a client is already paying a competitor for them. A few sit at a supplier who would remove them tomorrow in exchange for a longer contract. The decision is a sequence: which levers first, at what price to the client, with which supplier terms and what the P&L looks like after each one.
The reason this is harder than it looks is that the margin goes to the way carbon is being removed, far more than to the carbon itself: project by project, without a price attached, without a client in the room and without a supplier who gains from it. Read the chain that way and most of the programme turns into cost. Read it as a value stream, from the supplier who can prove the number to the client who will pay for it, then the same tonnes start to fund themselves.
The work is what we call Sustainable Value Stream Capture. It starts with the chain, and comes to the target last.
We go through the chain from sourcing to the client's invoice and we put two figures on each link: the carbon it carries and the money that moves with it. Most of that information exists, at the suppliers, in the logistics contracts, in the tender responses, and it has not yet been put side by side. Out of that reading come the places where a tonne removed is worth more than it costs: a client whose own Scope 3 target makes your low-carbon line worth a premium, a procurement clause that trades volume for a supplier's proof, a logistics loop that cuts emissions and working capital in the same move, a financing line that opens at a better rate once the number is audited.
Then we design the capture. For each lever, what it costs, what it returns, who owns it in the P&L and in what order the levers pay for the next one. The pricing conversation with clients is prepared with the sales team, who will be the ones holding it. The supplier terms are written with procurement. The CFO sees one model, with the carbon in it. He signs a plan where he used to sign a budget request.
What leaves the room: the carbon and margin map of the chain, the capture plan with its sequence and its P&L owners, with the client and supplier conversations ready to be held. We stay through the first conversations, because the plan holds only once a client has said yes to a price and a supplier to a term.
In the case below we take an industrial supplier quoting fixed prices on multi-year contracts while its own carbon cost under CBAM is about to become a line in each invoice. Priced into the quote before the contract is priced, the carbon stays a margin decision instead of a border surprise. The low-carbon variant becomes something a client pays a premium for rather than an exposure it carries alone.
As of January 2026, CBAM is enforced and CSRD Scope 3 reporting is mandatory for large EU companies. Your ERP still assigns zero to the carbon embedded in every purchase order.
ReadFabrice Macarty, Founder, CEO. He works with executive teams on the business models that regulation is about to move. He designs the value architecture that lets a company be rewarded for what it builds. On this situation he holds the pricing and financing side of the chain: who pays, at what rate, under which rule.
Lucile Olivas, CRO & Co-Founder. Nearly twenty years in purchasing, supply chain, circular economy and aftersales at Stellantis, Valeo and Alliance Automotive Group. She holds the chain itself: sourcing, supplier terms, logistics and the operations where the tonnes and the margin actually sit.
Multiplied into the business model, responsibility raises what performance earns. This is the page where that sentence is tested on a supply chain.
Read the principle in Our Approach: The force multiplierThe target you have signed, the chain you are running, the margin you cannot give. Tell us where it binds and we will tell you where to start.