Veritiv Corporation streamlines GHG emissions recalculation following major acquisition

Use Case

Recalculating and managing greenhouse gas emissions across a rapidly expanded operational footprint to maintain accurate reporting, ensure compliance with GHG standards, and enable transparent sustainability performance following a major acquisition.

Challenge

The acquisition of OPS presented Veritiv with a multifaceted challenge that threatened to complicate their emissions reporting and sustainability goals. The addition of manufacturing sites significantly altered their operational portfolio, creating the potential for emissions to appear dramatically increased year-over-year simply due to the acquisition rather than actual operational changes.

Veritiv had established a recalculation policy requiring any material change to their inventory boundary resulting in over a 5% change to trigger a full recalculation—a threshold clearly exceeded by the OPS acquisition. However, the organization was hesitant to complete the recalculation immediately, as they planned additional future acquisitions and wanted to avoid repeating the labor-intensive recalculation process annually.

The primary obstacles included obtaining comprehensive historical data from OPS, concerns about the significant level of effort required to recalculate historical emissions across multiple years, and the need to comply with GHG Protocol standards while maintaining operational efficiency. Additionally, Veritiv needed to ensure they could demonstrate genuine emissions reductions from their legacy operations separate from acquisition-related increases.

Solution

Leveraging their long-standing partnership with Arcadia, which had been managing Veritiv's GHG inventories since 2020, the company implemented a comprehensive solution combined with expert GHG accounting services.

Arcadia's approach centered on performing a baseline recalculation that incorporated historical emissions data from the acquired company into Veritiv's existing inventory. The implementation process was streamlined due to several key factors: Arcadia’s deep familiarity with Veritiv's existing emissions inventory, the availability of well-organized historical emissions data from OPS covering 2020 through 2023.

The solution provided Veritiv with sophisticated filtering capabilities, allowing them to view emissions data in multiple ways—including legacy business emissions separate from acquisition-related emissions, and trending analysis for both the original operations and the acquired company. This granular approach ensured compliance with the GHG Protocol while providing actionable insights for ongoing emissions management.

Benefits

The implementation delivered significant quantifiable outcomes that positioned Veritiv for continued success in their sustainability journey. Most importantly, Veritiv successfully reported their recalculated emissions in their 2025 sustainability report, achieving full compliance with both the GHG Protocol and their internal recalculation policy.

The solution revealed impressive emissions reduction achievements across both legacy and acquired operations. Veritiv's legacy business demonstrated a 42% reduction in emissions from 2020 to 2024, while the acquired OPS operations showed a 26% reduction over the same period, indicating that the acquisition aligned with Veritiv's emission reduction goals.