What about Waternostics?

We have an ongoing debate at the office - when are we going to start capturing and analyzing other indicators in Carbonostics (or a sister tool) like biodiversity, toxicity, and most top-of-mind water. And not just in the office - we get calls from journalists, emails from prospects, and requests for conference presentations asking the same thing.

The short answer is that it's just too early to say. We could, very easily, just add an empty box for users to enter the water consumption in litres for each material in a recipe and just total it up for the report. But really, that's not the point of what we deliver with Carbonostics, and it defeats the purpose of being smarter than an Excel spreadsheet.

Carbonostics is smarter for two key reasons - (1) it contains a large reference database (the largest, as far as we can tell) of the carbon emissions over 1500 different ingredients, materials and processes that go into a food product's lifecycle; and (2) it has built-in intelligence so you don't have to be a fully-trained LCA specialist (or even come close to that) to analyze the lifecycle of your product.

But water works so differently. The carbon emissions from a cow who primarily eats commercial feed in the south of France is fairly similar to a cow who primarily eats commercial feed in Texas. However, the grains that go into that feed have vastly different water consumption depending on where they were grown - was it at the top of the hill or the bottom of the hill, was it a wet year or a dry year, was irrigation used, what was the source of the irrigation, etc etc etc.

So, while it's tempting to just put an empty box on the screen to capture their water consumption if they happen to know it, we're going to hold off until the international debate results in some measurable and repeatable consensus that we can build on to create practical and affordable solutions for all food companies.

Thank you for your patience.