Fitness Equipment Manufacturer Meets EU CBAM Obligations Through Outsourced Carbon Reporting

A US fitness equipment manufacturer importing into the EU handed its CBAM assessment, supplier data collection, and quarterly emissions reporting to SPARQ360, reaching actual-emissions data for 80% of its CBAM products.

The client, a US manufacturer of fitness equipment, imports products into the EU that fall under the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). It had no internal knowledge or experience with the regulation, and it wanted a knowledgeable partner to take on the assessment, the supplier data collection, and the quarterly reporting rather than build that capability from scratch.

The Challenge

As an importer of eligible products into the EU, the client carried a set of CBAM obligations it was not equipped to meet on its own. It had to identify which of its products, volumes, and suppliers fell within scope, gather actual emissions data from the producers, calculate direct and indirect emissions, and report imported emissions each quarter on the EU CBAM portal.

None of that expertise existed in-house. The company needed to stay compliant as an importer without pulling its procurement, trade compliance, and legal teams off their core work to learn an unfamiliar regulatory regime. That combination, a real compliance obligation and no internal capacity to meet it, is what led the client to look for an outside team.

The Strategy

SPARQ360 designed an outsourced CBAM process that ran end to end. The first step was to assess the client’s products, suppliers, and imported volumes to define exactly what fell within CBAM scope. SPARQ360 then registered the client’s German entity as the importer of record for its CBAM products. From there, the team collected emissions data from suppliers through SPARQ360’s online CBAM supplier management platform, supported those suppliers through the data-gathering process, and verified their direct and indirect emissions calculations. Each quarter, SPARQ360 assessed import volumes against the reporting obligations and filed on the applicable EU portal. Throughout, SPARQ360 translated the regulatory requirements into operational supply chain steps while the client’s legal and trade teams retained the compliance decisions.

Related service: ESG & Sustainability · ESG in the Supply Chain

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The Implementation

The work began with a joint kickoff bringing together the client’s global procurement, EU supply chain, global trade compliance, and legal stakeholders so responsibilities were clear from the start. SPARQ360 assigned its carbon emissions engineers and sustainability compliance team to the assessment and the ongoing quarterly process. To make supplier engagement manageable across languages and geographies, SPARQ360 developed and implemented an online multilingual CBAM supplier platform that gave suppliers a structured way to submit data and gave everyone a trackable record of the exchange. SPARQ360 trained the client’s people on the process while continuing to run it as the client’s external sustainability team.

The Results

The client moved from no CBAM capability to a working quarterly reporting process backed by real supplier data rather than default values. Getting actual-emissions data for the large majority of imported CBAM products is the hard part of the regulation, and it is where most importers stall.

• CBAM compliance maintained through quarterly reporting on the EU portal.
• Actual-emissions data collected for 80% of imported CBAM products, moving beyond default values.
• Multilingual supplier platform deployed for structured, trackable supplier data exchange.
• Client team trained while SPARQ360 continues as the outsourced sustainability function.

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