To get the most accurate product footprint, you first need to import your products by calling PrepareProductFootprint(). Once your products are imported you can estimate a product's footprint by calling EstimateProductFootprint().

The more data we receive of your product, the more accurately we can estimate the product's footprint. Based on a combination of the data you send us, the data we receive from other parties, and the data we otherwise collect, we try to use the most appropriate product footprinting formula.

Below is a list of the currently supported formulas with their corresponding estimated accuracy and whether the product must be prepared first. We are constantly developing new formulas and validating those against our dataset.

Formula	Accuracy	Requires Prepare	Description
`MATERIAL_WEIGHT`	High	Yes	This uses the product's material and weight combination together with our proprietary emission factor dataset to estimate a product's footprint.
`MATERIAL_AVERAGE_WEIGHT`	High	Yes	This uses the average weight of products in a given category and the product's materials together with our proprietary emission factor dataset to estimate a product's footprint.
`TAXONOMY_WEIGHT`	Medium	Yes	This uses the product's weight and our proprietary emission factor dataset to estimate a product's footprint.
`TAXONOMY_AVERAGE_WEIGHT`	Medium	Yes	This uses the average weight of products in a given category and estimates the product's footprint using our proprietary emission factor dataset
`AVERAGE_CATEGORY_PRODUCT_WEIGHT`	Low	Yes	This uses the average emission factor of given category and the weight of the product if it is provided
`AVERAGE_CATEGORY_AVERAGE_WEIGHT`	Low	Yes	This uses the average emission factor given a category and the average weight of the products of the same category.
`SPEND`	Low	No	This uses the product's price and a proprietary algorithm based on most selling products to estimate the product's footprint. This is used as a fall back if all other formulas are not available.

If we have the weight of a product, we may use the TAXONOMY_WEIGHT formula, and if not, we use one of the other formulas we have available. If the product was not prepared, we fall back to the SPEND formula.

As a general rule we prefer to over-estimate a product's footprint, so the compensation will always cover the product's emissions, instead of under-estimating a product's footprint.

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Formulas in beta
TAXONOMY_AVERAGE_WEIGHT and SPEND_BY_TAXONOMY are currently in beta. This means we're still validating the results and we're enabling the formula slowly across are dataset.