Introducing the Restoration Carbon Protocol: An Industry Self-Standard for Scope 3 Reporting

There is no industry standard for how a restoration contractor should calculate, document, and report the carbon emissions from their work. Not from IICRC. Not from RIA. Not from any trade association or certifying body in the restoration industry.

That absence is becoming a problem. Commercial property managers are facing mandatory Scope 3 emissions disclosures — and restoration contractor activity is squarely in their value chain. Insurance carriers are building ESG criteria into preferred vendor programs. FEMA and federal contracting bodies are increasingly asking about emissions documentation for large-scale disaster response contracts.

When your clients need Scope 3 data from you and there’s no standard for what that data should include or how it should be calculated, everyone loses. The property manager files an inaccurate disclosure. The contractor gets treated as a data gap. The auditor flags the methodology. Nobody benefits.

The Restoration Carbon Protocol exists to fix that.

What the Restoration Carbon Protocol Is

The Restoration Carbon Protocol (RCP) is an industry self-standard for Scope 3 emissions calculation, documentation, and reporting specific to property restoration work. It is built on the GHG Protocol Corporate Value Chain Standard — the globally accepted framework for Scope 3 accounting — and adapted to the specific job types, material categories, waste streams, and operational patterns of the restoration industry.

RCP v1.0 will cover five core restoration job types: water damage mitigation, fire and smoke restoration, mold remediation, asbestos and hazmat abatement, and biohazard cleanup. For each job type, the protocol defines:

• Which GHG Protocol Scope 3 categories are relevant
• What data points need to be captured per job
• What calculation methodology to use for each emissions source
• What emission factors apply, sourced from EPA, DEFRA, and ecoinvent databases
• What the output format looks like for client delivery

The output is a per-job carbon report — a standardized one-page document any restoration contractor can complete and provide to their commercial clients for their GRESB, CDP, or SB 253 disclosure.

Why a Self-Standard and Not a Trade Association Standard

Trade association standards take years to develop through committee processes. The 2027 deadline doesn’t allow for that timeline. Commercial property managers need something workable now — in 2025 and 2026, as they build their data collection infrastructure ahead of the first required filings.

A published, rigorous, publicly available self-standard that is built on GHG Protocol methodology and uses credible emission factors is more useful to the market right now than a committee process that might produce something better in 2028. The goal of RCP is not to be the final word — it’s to be the first rigorous word, and to create the foundation that a trade association standard can build on when the bandwidth exists.

Self-published standards have established category leadership in other industries. The GHG Protocol itself started as a self-published standard by the World Resources Institute and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development before becoming the global norm. The precedent for rigorous self-published standards setting the terms of an industry conversation is well-established.

The 30-Day Build

RCP v1.0 is being built over 30 days through a structured series of knowledge nodes — each one establishing a piece of the technical framework, validated against GHG Protocol methodology, and published here on Tygart Media as it’s completed.

The publication sequence runs from foundation (what Scope 3 is and why it matters for restoration) through technical framework (job-type-specific calculation methodologies) to commercial application (how to use the framework with clients and in RFP responses) to the full framework document publication.

The Restoration Golf League network of independent restoration contractors will serve as the pilot cohort — providing feedback on the calculation methodology, testing the per-job carbon report format against their actual job data, and validating that the framework is workable for contractors who are running businesses, not sustainability departments.

How to Get Involved

If you are a restoration contractor who wants to be involved in the RCP pilot, a commercial property manager looking for Scope 3 data from your restoration vendor network, an ESG consultant working with commercial real estate clients, or an insurance carrier building ESG criteria into your preferred vendor program — this standard is being built with your needs in mind.

The RCP framework will be published open-access. The knowledge nodes building toward it are published here as they’re completed. Follow along, contribute feedback, and contact Tygart Media if you want to be part of the pilot cohort that validates the framework before v1.0 publication.