Watershed Launches AI-Powered Product Carbon Footprint Solution

Climate solutions provider Watershed announced the launch of Watershed Product Footprints, a new AI-powered solution aimed at enabling companies to measure and address the carbon footprint of products, materials and processes.

According to Watershed, the new solution comes as companies continue to face challenges in assessing and understanding their upstream purchasing emissions, which can account for 70% or more of a company’s total carbon footprint, with spend-based estimates often providing an inaccurate picture, and detailed carbon assessments remaining prohibitively expensive and slow to produce.

The new solution breaks down everything a company buys into the materials and processes behind them, using AI to trace upstream steps ranging from the emissions of different sub-materials, processes to transport. The solution also enables users to add primary data and first-hand experience with product and procurement processes in order to further refine the product footprint and produce a more accurate assessment.

Watershed highlighted key benefits of the new solution to address the top barriers to understanding product-level emissions, including speed, with the solution capable of producing an upstream carbon footprint in minutes; accuracy, achieved through the AI-powered decomposition of products and processes, and; actionability, with the solution enabling sustainability and procurement teams to run scenarios and assess the impact of different purchasing decisions.

In a post announcing the new product release, Watershed said:

“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.”