Launch HN: Bend (YC S22) – Automatically measure your company's carbon footprint

Companies would be better investing in encouraging people to behave better on compus if they were serious, and I mean by actually investing to make using eco friendly things pleasent, not using brown paper to give printouts to clients or having some guy who shouts about the wrong paper going in the wrong bin all the time.

Companies should buy things that people want that produce less waste (yes this then drives cost up and profits down), consolidating physical services (it, printing, office space etc.) and using recycled products by preference (again good recycled paper is not brown toilet paper and can even be given to clients). And when companies start doing this rather than individuals it has a knock on effect on the market and affordability.

And finally, I'm sorry, I fail to understand why anyone needs to pay to be told this.

Re: do you have any concerns that your users might shortcut the work to produce high quality estimates of their Scope 3 emissions when you have made it so easy to get lower quality estimates?

> I think the high order bit here is that 99%+ of companies don't measure their emissions at all. This is for a good reason — measuring your emissions historically has been quite labor-intensive. Even for large companies, there is always a 'long tail' of 'Scope 3 goods and services' transactions that are hard to measure. Our goal is to create a scalable solution so that a much larger share of companies are able to participate.

Re: your grocery store example —

> This is a fair point. Our main belief is that realtime, actionable data trumps perfectly attributed data, if perfectly attributed data requires a bottoms-up manual model. The advantage of the spend-based approach is that (1) it's realtime, and (2) it aligns incentives at the company level. The holy grail, however, would be itemized spend data (level 3 data), where you could factor in the emissions of your specific line-items. Unfortunately, that data is nearly impossible to get (yet). Maybe that's Bend 2.0 :)

Re: re-accounting historical emissions —

> Yes! We use the emissions 'factor' that most closely matches the transaction date. So for example, if you bought a Starbucks coffee in 2020, we would use the 2020 Starbucks factor, and if you bought a Starbucks in 2021, we would use the 2021 Starbucks factor. If Starbucks is late to publish their 2022 report, we would recalculate the emissions when the info is updated. For our category fallbacks, we also take currency / region into consideration.

Happy to chat more, either with you or the WRI folks! Thanks for the questions.