SAN FRANCISCO, CA, Sept. 23, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Watershed, the leading enterprise sustainability platform, today announced the release of Product Footprints, sustainability AI to advance supply chain decarbonization. Product Footprints deconstructs every good purchased by a company into the materials and processes behind it, unlocking more accurate upstream emissions measurement and smarter product design and procurement decisions.
Product Footprints solves for three persistent problems in scope 3.1 (purchased goods and services) emissions measurement, which can represent 60-80% of a company's carbon footprint:
- Speed: Compared to traditional life cycle assessment measurements–which take up to a year and require sustainability teams to collect prohibitively high volumes of data from their suppliers–Product Footprints produces a footprint of a company's purchased goods in minutes.
- Precision: Product Footprints decomposes each material into the sub-material and processes that comprise it, enabling new depth of accuracy compared to existing methods, which use broad spend-based assumptions based on proxy data that fail to account for actual procurement choices.
- Actionability: Until now, companies lacked sufficient insight to inform sustainable procurement decisions. With Product Footprints, sustainability and procurement teams can refine their measurement with primary data and run scenarios to model the impact of different purchasing decisions.
Product Footprints is one of the first releases in Watershed's AI suite, a transparent multi-agent system purpose-built for sustainability. The system is encoded with climate science expertise from global sustainability databases and was architected by Watershed's 21-person team of climate scientists and AI experts, whose research has led to 15 published papers and conference presentations. Product Footprints has 19 collaborative AI agents and maximizes traceability, editability, and actionability in its outputs.
“We wanted to leverage AI not just to speed up workflows, but to drive meaningful decisions,” said Christian Anderson, co-founder of Watershed. “Companies have been making procurement choices based on incomplete or inaccurate emissions data because existing approaches don't work at scale. Product Footprints demonstrates how AI, when encoded with sustainability intelligence, can overcome long-standing barriers to sustainability progress.”
Purpose-built sustainability AI
Watershed's sustainability AI includes three processing layers: a material enrichment layer that clarifies and adds context to company data, a supply chain intelligence layer that models procurement processes, and a sustainability intelligence layer that maps the materials and processes behind each purchased material to emissions factors based on region, supplier, and technical specifications.
Watershed provides confidence scores for AI calculations and documentation of the data sources and reasoning behind each mapping, addressing transparency concerns that have limited adoption of AI tools for reporting and operational decisions.
Early results
Product Footprints has been tested by more than 20 enterprise companies with complex supply chains, from a range of industries including manufacturing, automotive, chemicals, and more. Early use cases for Product Footprints include:
- Reductions in the real world and on paper: An automaker had purchased low-carbon steel but did not get credit for the resulting emissions reductions because of the limitations of traditional measurement approaches. Product Footprints correctly identified and modeled the lower emissions of the company's sustainable steel.
- Effective supplier engagement: A life sciences company with over 50,000 global suppliers used Product Footprints to consolidate data from across 70+ internal databases to prioritize impactful supplier engagement. The company had previously struggled with manual processes that caused delays and data gaps in their sustainability program.
“Watershed Product Footprints is helping us uncover the nuances across our supplier base in ways we simply couldn't before,” said Natalie Watson, Group Director of Sustainability at The Vita Group, a European flexible PU foam manufacturer headquartered in the UK and early Product Footprints user. “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.”
Read more about Product Footprints at watershed.com/solutions/product-footprints.
About Watershed
Watershed is the enterprise sustainability platform. Companies like Airbnb, Carlyle Group, FedEx, Visa, and Dr. Martens use Watershed to manage climate and ESG data, produce audit-ready metrics for voluntary and regulatory reporting including CSRD, and drive real decarbonization. Watershed is the platform of choice for companies seeking to reduce emissions; meet customer, investor and regulatory requirements; and modernize their sustainability programs. Watershed customers also have exclusive access to a marketplace of pre-vetted, high-quality carbon projects and groundbreaking virtual power purchase agreements.
Amelia PennimanWatershedamelia@watershed.com