How Zevero’s AI-Powered Emission Engine Solves Sustainability Challenges

As organisations work to reduce their carbon footprint, Scope 3 emissions - the indirect emissions across supply chains - remain the most complex and challenging to measure and manage. From collecting the data to accurately matching them with emission factors, sustainability managers face countless hurdles in calculating these emissions properly. 

With Scope 3 emissions accounting for an average of 70% of an organisation's footprint and up to 99% for some Zevero customers, they represent a major challenge and opportunity for reaching net zero. 

In this blog, we’ll explore how Zevero’s AI-powered emissions engine, the calculation engine in our platform, addresses these challenges. We’ll break down the benefits of our AI-driven solution and show how it saves time, and resources and delivers the accuracy needed for effective carbon management.

In its simplest form, the Zevero emission engine makes it possible for an organisation to match tens of thousands, or even millions of procurement records with the correct emission factor.

The Challenges of Calculating Scope 3 Emissions

Calculating Scope 3 emissions is tough. These emissions come from a variety of sources in the supply chain such as transportation and waste disposal and the data is often inconsistent and scattered. Three key challenges make Scope 3 emissions particularly difficult to manage:

1. Data complexity

Scope 3 data can include thousands or even millions of records scattered across different data systems which makes it a logistical nightmare to manage. Not only does this slow down the process, but it also increases the likelihood of errors creeping into your calculations.

2. Accuracy and consistency

One of the biggest obstacles to accurate emissions reporting is the inconsistency in naming conventions. Different suppliers may use different names for the same product. For example, one supplier might refer to a product as “Apple MacBook,” while another might list it as “MacBook Pro” or even “McBook Pro Apple.” These subtle differences make it nearly impossible for traditional tools like Excel to match data correctly or for a consultant to remember the choices they or their team made. This leads to inaccurate and inconsistent data in your final report.

3. Knowledge gaps

Even if you manage to gather all the data, choosing the correct emission factor from an extensive list is its own challenge. Many organisations struggle with accessing the right databases and understanding how to map their products or services accurately to these emission factors.

These are challenges our customers faced before working with Zevero.

How Zevero’s Emission Engine Solves These Challenges

At Zevero, we understand these challenges firsthand. 

After years of development and leveraging our combined climate expertise, we created an AI-driven emissions engine that automates the process of matching emission factors and measuring emissions, taking the complexity out of reporting and ensuring data accuracy. 

Imagine sorting through hundreds of thousands of items with different names and categories - doing this manually would take months and often tens or hundreds of thousands in consulting fees or internal resources. 

Zevero’s AI-driven platform streamlines this process by automatically matching items with the correct emission factors, even when naming conventions vary.

Data cleaning and standardisation

The AI function within the platform makes sense of unstructured data so whether the naming of an item is “MacBook Pro” or “Apple MacBook 15inch 512GB,” it will map the item to the correct emissions factor.

Granular accuracy

Zevero’s AI goes beyond using average emission factors by selecting the most appropriate emission factors which are prioritised based on the following information:

• Name 
• Supplier 
• Country region 
• Country
• Emission factor year

With over 200,000 verified emission factors available from 7 global databases, Zevero ensures that your emissions are calculated with the highest level of accuracy. For example, using a more precise emission factor might mean reporting 0.7kgCO2e instead of 1kgCO2e, giving you a more accurate reflection of your carbon footprint. 

We can highlight an example from one of our UK clients, JUBEL. 

JUBEL have worked with Zevero since 2021. In FY22 their emissions are 0.770kgCO2e per litre of beer sold. When they reported their emissions to the supermarkets who buy their products, the average emissions suggestion was 2.34kgCO2e per litre of beer sold. That means that JUBEL are able to report their emissions as 67.09% lower than average and their competitors by using Zevero.

Confidence score and matching capability

To add another layer of transparency, Zevero calculates a confidence score for each item to indicate the accuracy of the selected emission factor. 

If there is a 95+% match, we accept the match automatically. If the match is between 85%-95% then we use the assigned emission factor and our sustainability experts review the data to ensure that the match is correct. If it falls below 85% our climate and sustainability experts will review the data and manually match with the correct emissions factor. 

The best bit? As the emission engine continues to receive hundreds of thousands of data points including the manual matches from the team, it will continue to improve, making Scope 3 emissions more accurate over time.

Time- savings through automation

Zevero’s emission engine significantly reduces the time required to process scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions. Calculations that go into detail on scope 3 emissions would normally take hundreds, if not thousands of hours can be completed in a fraction of the time. Our platform processes up to 84,000 records daily, eliminating the bottlenecks that often come with manual data entry or waiting on consultants.

What this means to you and your organisation

By automating emissions calculations, Zevero allows you to gain insights across your value and supply chain quickly and accurately. This allows you to keep your focus on driving meaningful sustainability initiatives and deliver on your climate goals rather than being held back by manual data management. 

Streamline your sustainability efforts

Calculating emissions, especially Scope 3, doesn’t have to be an overwhelming task. With Zevero’s emissions engine, you can automate the entire process, saving time, improving accuracy and staying ahead of reporting requirements.

Get in touch with our team today to explore how we can help simplify your carbon management.