Most of the conversation around CBAM focuses on your own plant’s emissions. For a lot of exporters, that’s not where the real cost sits — the bigger number is usually the emissions embedded in what you bought to make your product: scrap, alloys, clinker, intermediate goods from your own suppliers.

Why the default value is worse than it sounds

If a supplier doesn’t give you their specific embedded-emissions figure, the EU doesn’t leave the field blank — it fills it with a default value. These default values are deliberately set above the real global average for that good, so that using a default is never the cheaper option compared to getting a real, verified figure. In effect: no data from your supplier means you certify for a dirtier plant than the one you actually used, and pay accordingly.

Why this is an operational problem, not a data problem

The number itself isn’t hard to calculate once you have it. The hard part is getting it: your supplier likely has no EU customs account, no reason to log into your systems, and no template for what an EU declarant needs. Chasing this by email, across however many suppliers feed your CBAM-covered exports, is the actual bottleneck for most exporters we talk to.

What actually works

A tokenised link, sent directly to the supplier, that asks for exactly the figure needed — no account required, no login, no unrelated system access. The moment a supplier responds with a verified number, the calculation for anything downstream of that input switches from the EU default to their actual figure automatically.

This is what CarbonComply’s supplier declaration flow does — see the CBAM page for the full mechanics, or book a compliance assessment if you want to see it against your own supplier list.