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by ianpgo 1148 days ago
How’s the coverage of your carbon accounting for different purchase types? For example AWS services vs business travel expenses?
1 comments

Thanks for the question!

So the way that Bend works, we take a transaction, and then match it with the best available 'emissions factor'. So, for example, if you purchase something at Starbucks, we match that transaction to the Starbucks specific emissions factor: https://bend.green/starbucks

Over 65% of total market cap is now covered by this sustainability data, and we aggregate that data, and use it to estimate the emissions for each transaction.

Of course there is a very long tail. So if you buy a coffee at a small coffee shop, we likely don't have that merchant-specific data. In those cases, we fall back to "Merchant Category Code" (MCC) emissions factors.

And finally, in some cases we have SKU-level data. E.g. we have an Amazon Business integration where we get the actual specific item data.

Long story short is we have surprisingly high merchant coverage — well north of 60%. We have pretty limited SKU-level coverage today, but expanding. And then we always have an MCC fallback. The larger the merchant, the more likely we are to have good data for them (we're trying to grow coverage for mid market and smaller businesses with Bend).

This means that you can get a pretty detailed, totally automated sense of your emissions hotspots.

More info here: https://usebend.com/how-it-works