Watershed, a provider of climate solutions, has introduced Watershed Product Footprints, an innovative AI-powered tool designed to assist companies in evaluating and addressing the carbon footprint of their products, materials, and processes. This launch comes at a time when businesses are grappling with difficulties in assessing and comprehending their upstream purchasing emissions, which can constitute 70% or more of a company’s total carbon footprint. Traditional spend-based estimates frequently offer an inaccurate picture, and detailed carbon assessments have been costly and time-consuming to produce.
The new solution dissects everything a company purchases into the materials and processes involved, employing AI to trace upstream activities, including emissions from various sub-materials and transportation processes. Users can enhance the accuracy of the product footprint by incorporating primary data and firsthand experience with product and procurement processes.
Watershed emphasised the solution’s key advantages in overcoming the main obstacles to understanding product-level emissions. These include speed, with the capability to generate an upstream carbon footprint in minutes; accuracy, achieved through AI-powered decomposition of products and processes; and actionability, enabling sustainability and procurement teams to run scenarios and evaluate the impact of different purchasing decisions.
In announcing the product release, Watershed stated: “For decades, companies have been forced to make sustainability and procurement decisions based on incomplete or inaccurate emissions data because existing approaches simply don’t work at scale. Product Footprints demonstrates how AI, when encoded with sustainability intelligence, can transform corporate sustainability.”
