Amazon Friendly

User gets prompted on the CO2 impact this item has contributed to
User gets prompted a second time, hoping that they would select the "alterntives" options after the 2nd nudge
User receives an alert that he/she had made the right environmentally friendly decision for his selecting the alternatives
User gets shown the alternatives

Inspiration

We realized that more than 5 Billion tons of CO2 are being emitted by the U.S. alone. 18% of those are contributed by food related activities. We found out that the everyday American was not aware of their damage to the environment, and believed that should they know, they would rather cleaner alternatives. We started with grocery shopping on Amazon as they are said to have a 17% market share of the online grocery market.

What it does

It nudges the consumer to make more environmentally friendly grocery purchases online, via the Amazon Fresh page. The extension prompts the user twice, stating the environmental impact that their grocery has to the environment in terms of CO2, and providing them more environmentally friendly alternatives instead.

How I built it

Web crawled data from Amazon Fresh web page and identified key words to provide an estimate of the environmental impact of the purchased item. We utilized sweet alert to prompt the user with facts regarding their to-be-purchased grocery item and provide them environmentally friendly alternatives.

Challenges I ran into

It was difficult to get the full "cooperation" from different foods listed on the Amazon site. Such items are not as extensive in their food ingredients, leading to difficulties in automating the web crawling process.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We created something that can allow the everyday consumer to be aware of the extent of environmental impact that their personal groceries contributed to. This small step of awareness can bring forward a large leap in having a more CO2 friendly society.

What I learned

The smallest and most innocent actions that we make as a consumer such as buying groceries, has an impact to our environment.

What's next for Amazon Friendly

Provide world emission comparisons across items and allow the tracking of a user's total environmental foodprint. Such would provide the consumer with the ability to benchmark with world environmental standards to make more environmentally informed decisions.