Product Footprinting at Scale

A product carbon footprint (PCF) measures the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with a specific product’s components, materials, processes, and lifecycle stages. Depending on the scope, this can include cradle-to-gate emissions (from raw material extraction to the factory gate) or cradle-to-grave emissions (from raw material extraction through product distribution, use, and end of life).

A corporate carbon footprint measures emissions across the whole company and the broader value chain. It includes emissions sources such as facilities, fleets, business travel, investments, use of sold products, and purchased goods and services.

Corporate footprinting shows where emissions occur across the business, whereas product footprinting shows what drives emissions within a specific product.

A product carbon footprint (PCF) measures the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with a product across its life cycle, from upstream raw material extraction and production through distribution, use, and disposal.

A life cycle assessment (LCA) covers a broader set of environmental impact categories. It assesses a product’s holistic environmental performance, including GHG emissions but also other impacts on air, water, land, and resource use. A PCF is a specific type of LCA focused on GHG emissions.
 

AITrack uses custom activity-based LCA models tailored to the specific materials, processes, technologies and locations behind each product. Unlike spend-based methods, AITrack identifies the root causes of product impacts - down to the site, material, activity, and component levels - by tracking complete lifecycle inventories of inputs and outputs.

This methodology provides a granular, actionable view of product impacts, helping companies identify hotspots, make more informed product design and sourcing decisions, and focus supplier engagement on commitments for specific interventions to advance decarbonization.

AITrack makes activity-based LCA scalable by combining its unique LCA methodology with an industry-leading LCA activity database and a high-performance software platform.

AITrack’s LCA database covers 500K+ industrial, energy, and agricultural activities globally, helping teams build detailed product models faster and with greater consistency.

AITrack’s modeling approach allows changes such as material substitutions, renewable energy procurement, or energy use updates to be applied across thousands of products at once. This enables portfolio-wide scenario testing, hotspot analysis, and lower-carbon product differentiation without manually remodeling each product.

AITrack integrates primary data from clients and their suppliers, such as bills of materials (BoMs), product specifications, energy use, environmental product declarations (EPDs), purchase orders, supplier surveys and more. Data can be collected through API integrations, file uploads, or AITrack’s Supply Chain Engagement solution, which helps suppliers share existing data or calculate impacts for their own products., which helps suppliers share existing data or calculate impacts for their own products.

AITrack also uses its own industry-leading LCA activity database, covering industrial, energy, and agricultural activities from 300+ sources. This helps fill data gaps and build a reliable analytical foundation to inform collaborative action, improve data quality, and optimize product assessments over time.
 

AITrack can deliver granular product footprint results across thousands of products within a few months, with results conforming to ISO 14067 and ISO 14040/14044 standards. The specific timeline depends on portfolio size, data availability, and product complexity.

Our scalable data collection approach, automated data pipelines and LCA expertise enable us to develop footprint results for hundreds or thousands of products at once, while maintaining consistency and precision across the portfolio.