Across industries, companies face the same sustainability roadblock: their Scope 3.1 emissions—the embodied carbon in everything they buy—are the biggest part of their footprint, but the hardest to act on. Spend-based estimates often only give a rough sense of the problem, and traditional lifecycle assessments (LCAs) and product carbon footprints (PCFs) are too slow, costly, and siloed to scale. Critically, to take action, companies need to collaborate with suppliers—but without data to steer conversations, many are at a loss for where to start.
Watershed Product Footprints changes that. Leveraging advanced AI models, Watershed can quickly build product footprints for everything a company buys that go beyond mapping to a single emissions factor. Taking into account nuanced differences between suppliers, materials, and processes, the resulting product footprints are fully decomposable exposing insights previously hidden many layers down in a material’s supply chain.
At the micro-level, companies can steer procurement decisions by comparing small differences between suppliers’ materials; at the macro-level, they can drive strategy by understanding which processes upstream drive emissions across everything they purchase or which materials and suppliers should be the highest priority to collaborate with.
Read on to hear how Watershed customers from Fortune 500 manufacturers to global life science leaders are using Product Footprints to bring crucial data into procurement and product design decisions, and ultimately accelerate hitting their climate targets.
Capture the nuances of everything you purchase and reflect them into your corporate footprint
Spend-based approaches are efficient ways to understand emissions at the corporate level. Activity-based approaches go a level deeper, but can still miss nuances between suppliers or materials when mapping to the same emissions factor. Capturing more nuanced data is hard given potentially-relevant emissions data is vast and scattered, and companies are often at a loss for how to account for any information that is captured in measurements.
The Vita Group, a leading flexible polyurethane foam manufacturer with pan European operations, has leveraged Watershed’s advanced AI model to pull together material-specific data otherwise impossible to wrangle across their supplier-base. “There is so much data out there—you could read a 200-page sustainability report from a supplier and try to pull out insights,” noted Natalie Watson, Vita’s Group Director of Sustainability. “But Watershed’s AI has unlocked the ability of understanding that data at scale and turning it into practical insights.”
One automaker’s primary challenge is breaking down their bill of materials to accurately reflect the greenhouse gas emissions from the materials in their vehicle. Historically, in mapping each component to an available emissions factor, some materials had lower-precision matches that didn’t account for relevant information like where the component was made or which process was used to manufacture it.
With Watershed, that customer can leverage AI to get more accurate emissions estimates on individual components–including by sharing any details they know about a given material. With more accurate information, procurement and design teams have a better sense of which suppliers to focus on and how to move the needle.
Another Watershed customer’s manufacturing plants worked on an initiative to reduce scrap rates—i.e., the percentage of produced goods that are not usable—to improve overall business efficiency. One happy byproduct of lower scrap rates is lower emissions, though it can be very difficult to pin down the right data to reflect those emissions reductions. With Watershed Product Footprints, that customer can reflect business changes like that in their product-level and corporate footprints. And – for customers making “green” decisions like purchasing low-carbon alternatives that may cost more, those lower emissions are accurately reflected in corporate measurements, replacing spend-based approaches that may have reflected those decisions as higher emissions.
Easily account for product-level data previously hidden across ERPs, emails, spreadsheets, and more
For many companies, product and materials data is a headache to collect, track, and improve with data spread between millions of lines of sheets, hundreds of ERPs, and thousands of suppliers.
Specialized, a California-based bike brand, is able to fine tune their product footprint with enriched primary data that was previously spread across emails, annual supplier impact reports, and product BOMs. Now, that data has a home where it can accurately reflect and accelerate emission reductions.
Historically, nuances were lost in Specialized’s measurement, either because certain materials that didn’t have a strong match in an emissions factor database weren’t accurately represented, or because there wasn’t a way to account for information they knew that would impact emissions.
“With Product Footprints, we can account for details like use of recycled and bio-based materials, supplier-specific energy use for a specific manufacturing process, and which suppliers are using renewable energy,” explained Nadia Carroll, Specialized’s Product and Engineering Sustainability Lead.
Thermo Fisher Scientific, a global life sciences leader, has emissions-relevant data stored across more than 70 ERP systems, and hosts a product catalog that includes items with hundreds of thousands of lines in a single BOM. Historically, their team spent valuable time chasing down the right contacts—sometimes at sites halfway across the world in order to gather the right data to inform their measurements.
“Our historic processes were slow and presented many friction points where data could get lost or delayed,” says Tom Kraeutler, Supplier Decarbonization Manager at Thermo Fisher. “With Watershed, we have all of that data in one place. It cuts through millions of lines of supplier, product and material data, and tells us where to focus our time and energy to scale our sustainability efforts.”
Even more powerfully, though, Watershed helps companies pinpoint opportunities to improve data over time. By highlighting where data is uncertain, companies can see where the highest-leverage places to improve data collection or supplier engagement would be to get deeper insights.
“Watershed gives us a way to focus. We can go from files with hundreds of thousands of lines to a condensed view of the hundred that really matter, allowing us to focus on improving our data and the overall model. That’s a huge unlock for our small team,” says Kraeutler.
Simulate potential decarbonization pathways
With the data model in place, teams can run “what-if” scenarios to explore the impact of switching suppliers, increasing recycled content, or changing processes.
For Burton, a snowboarding manufacturing company, more than 95% of emissions sit in Scope 3. The team needed a way to break those emissions down into materials and categories to hit ambitious reduction targets.
“We had intuition on hotspots, but couldn’t validate the impact of swapping a material in our product design,” explained Emily Foster, Director of Environmental and Social Impact.
With Watershed, Burton has been able to get data on separate materials to see how different materials compare – like different nylon blends for snowboard components where we can compare emissions data alongside performance and cost. “We now have the granular data needed to activate positive decisionmaking internally. Beyond that, we’re able to see how one change can impact the whole,” added Foster.
Leverage better data for better procurement
Companies like The Vita Group are using Product Footprints to finally bring sustainability data into the procurement process.
“With Watershed, we have consistent, comparable data ‘apples-to-apples’ insights on what we source, where it comes from, and how it’s made,” said Watson.
To drive better procurement, companies need to understand the differences between products and materials. For The Vita Group, Product Footprints is valuable for different types of comparisons. “We’re comparing suppliers of the same product where we know all are following the same production process to understand geographic differences. We’re also comparing suppliers of another product where they’re using different processes to understand the impacts of those. Finally, we’re comparing bio-based and generic versions of the same product to understand how significant the differences are to inform procurement,” Watson added.
The impact of those comparisons are huge, helping sustainability teams partner with procurement in a higher-leverage way than ever before. At The Vita Group, “it brings carbon impact data into the same conversation as other buying criteria, giving us a clearer, more holistic view,” said Watson.
Before working with Watershed, to get important product-level views that inform procurement and product design, customers had to manually map thousands of lines of data to activity-based emissions factors. Customers needed to re-do allocations for each SKU any time a customer requested data or something changed. Watershed Product Footprints boils these processes down to minutes for every material you purchase.
Specialized, a California based bike brand, historically used a simplified version of their product line to calculate carbon measurements. “With Watershed Product Footprints, we’re able to understand emissions by product SKUs to highlight differences between bikes; we can compare the SWorks Tarmac SL8 against the Tarmac SL8 Pro,” said Carroll at Specialized.
Speed up the process of making PCFs
Many companies like Charter Next Generation (CNG), a leading specialty films and material science producer, have noticed an uptick in customer interest in carbon data. "CNG is experiencing a significant increase in requests for product carbon footprints (PCFs) for the films we produce. Brand owner customers want to understand and reduce the PCFs of their packaging to impact Scope 3 emissions," said Scott Hammer, Sustainability Fellow at Charter Next Generation.
For companies with dynamic product designs and supply chains, static PCFs become stale. For companies with vast numbers of SKUs, PCFs aren't feasible across everything sold.
The most painful part of the PCF process is most often calculating emissions upstream of a product, with carbon hidden in the supply chain beyond a company's own operations. Watershed Product Footprints makes complete upstream PCFs to cover that hardest part of the journey, saving customers time and money previously spent trying to keep PCFs up to date.
"Leveraging Watershed’s platform, data, and AI-powered PCF tool enables Charter Next Generation to respond more quickly and with a higher-value PCF. It is quite exciting,” added Hammer.
Drive meaningful conversations with suppliers
Product Footprints isn’t just an internal tool—it’s a catalyst for supplier engagement. Customers are using Watershed to compare suppliers on RFPs and benchmark performance, but beyond that, it’s shaping how customers have conversations with suppliers. Customers are using Product Footprints across the spectrum, from leveraging it in negotiations with suppliers where they can understand how suppliers might be pricing the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme carbon costs into products, to sharing tailored reduction opportunities with suppliers based on emissions hotspots within materials.
Many customers are also using product footprints to validate data coming from suppliers. The Vita Group receives LCAs from some suppliers on some products, but these are hard to compare to each other to actually drive decision making. “During our review of emissions data for bio-polyols, we noticed some variation compared to figures we’d previously seen. That prompted us to explore the underlying assumptions and methodologies used in supplier LCAs more closely,” said Watson at The Vita Group.
“This process has helped us refine the kinds of questions we ask, for example, understanding which feedstocks were used in bio-based polyols—so we can better validate data, identify gaps, and collaborate with suppliers on opportunities for improvement.”
Zoom out to see the impacts of product footprints on your supply chain
In Product Footprints, companies aren’t only looking at material-level data. By tying material data to purchase orders, companies unlock insights like:
- Understanding which materials are drive emissions most across everything you purchase to understand where to focus
- Seeing which processes upstream of you (e.g., manufacturing basic iron and steel) are responsible for most emissions to tailor your supplier engagement strategy
- Putting cost, material, quantity, and supplier data side-by-side to tie together financial and sustainability data in language procurement teams understand
For companies like The Vita Group, Product Footprints has gone beyond comparing individual materials side-by-side; it enables looking at patterns across everything they purchase.
“Watershed Product Footprints is helping us uncover the nuances across our supplier base in ways we simply couldn’t before,” said The Vita Group’s Natalie Watson. “The speed and clarity of insight are game-changing. Where we once focused deeply on a handful of suppliers, we can now spot patterns and opportunities across thousands. It’s not about comparison, it’s about collaboration, and using data to accelerate progress together.”
Watershed Product Footprints is connecting sustainability ambition and operational reality. By making emissions data as available, updated, and actionable as any other business metric, Watershed customers are charting a faster path to hitting their targets.
