Be Green

Inspiration

With climate change and other global issues becoming a larger and larger concern, everyone needs to do what they can to help save the environment. Our idea was to make an extension that could help the average customer to make more informed shopping decisions based on the estimated carbon footprint of each product. In the long run, this would help to promote more ecologically friendly businesses to succeed in markets like amazon.

What it does

Our extension goes goes through each item listing on an amazon search and generates an estimate for the lbs of CO2 of carbon footprint generated through the creation of that product and shipping. Based on this estimate, the extension also adds one of several images to either encourage or discourage the purchase of the product. The extension also tracks the users lifetime total emissions from purchases.

How we built it

None of us really had much experience with chrome extensions or vanilla javascript, so our method of attack was pretty much combined trial and error. We created a basic extension, then proceeded to continually branch and experiment with ideas from there.

Challenges we ran into

I think that there were three main challenges that we ran into during this hackathon:

The first and biggest challenge is the lack of data available for carbon footprint estimations. While most amazon items include some helpful statistics like item weight and size, amazon does not require that sellers list their location which prevented us from factoring in shipping emissions. Additionally, while there are existing estimates for some products, it is very difficult to accurately differentiate between products that are very similar. Our consensus is that while a project like this could have some really important benefits, it would take the actual marketplace (Amazon) requiring retailers to report the carbon emissions of their product to get it fully functional.

The second challenge that we faced was trying to use the ibm cloud. When we tried to set it up, we ran into a few issues eventually resulting in us getting tech help from the ibm sponsors. While we got the cloud working, it was too late to fully integrate it into our project as a backend database.

The third issue that we faced was learning how to query html nodes. Amazon has a fairly complicated structure to their html site, and we spent several hours trying to get the correct queries to find the data we needed.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I think we are proudest of both our idea and the amount that we were able to experiment during this hackathon. While our final product isn't necessarily what we envisioned at the start of the weekend, it was pretty fun to be able to get experience making a chrome extension.

What we learned

Chrome extensions are surprisingly easy! While our team definitely ran into some road blocks regarding our idea, this was a great learning experience that gave us all a new insight on javascript, even across our different hardware and software backgrounds. Moving forward, we have all been talking about being able to create more extensions to help automate simple tasks in our lives.

What's next for Be Green

While we think that this project is really important and could have a major environmental impact on the retail industry, unfortunately there are too many issues blocking a small team from developing it. Within this hackathon we would have loved to finish connecting the ibm cloud, but time limitations stopped this. Moving forward, ideally a retail company would implement this idea themselves to allow consumers more informed shopping.