BeCOOLess: Your CO₂-aware shopping list assistant

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  This is our logo.

Inspiration

The potential to change the world is inherent in the small choices we take on a daily basis. Actions, as unnoticeable as the flap of a 🦋 butterfly's wings, can gain incredible power and shape the world. We take the butterfly effect, as a motivation to identify small, yet effective actions anyone could take to tackle climate change,

According to WHO, a carbon footprint is a measure of the impact your activities have on the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) produced through the burning of fossil fuels and is expressed as a weight of CO2 emissions produced in tonnes. The average carbon footprint for a person globally is closer to 4 tons. To have the best chance of avoiding a 2℃ rise in global temperatures, the average global carbon footprint per year needs to drop under 2 tons by 2050. Lowering individual carbon footprints from 16 tons to 2 tons doesn't happen overnight! By making small changes to our actions, we can start making a big difference.

Our daily lives heavily influence this emission. Shopping is an activity that almost all humans do which impacts how we live. But most of us lack the dedication, and time, to set up a shopping list that combines all our goals of a healthy, environmentally friendly, yet affordable diet.

What it does

BeeCOOLess is an app that helps you design shopping lists that fit to your lifestyle choices. Based on your list and a small extra budget (say 5%) our state of the art algorithm digs through available offers and recommends a greener option, enabling you to fight climate change while staying on your budget.

How we built it

We first conducted a small poll - with around 100 people - and found that 9 out of 10 participants would like to buy greener products at a small additional cost. Roughly every second participant was willing to spend 5% or more on greener products in the supermarket.

Based on that, we observed that our idea was valid and worthed to invest on. Then, we split tasks among the team as the following: one person to look for available datasets, one person to work on the Backend, one with the Frontend, one person to build the optimization algorithm and the last one, to build a business plan out of the idea.

Challenges we ran into

• We had to keep cutting many features of our App given time constrains: we wanted to build an MVP that would work, even if our datasets were small or not precise. The extra-features we plan to incorporate in the future. So, in essence, we ended up with an App that:
• It's straightforward.
• User Log in to the app and find a supermarket of preference (can be the closest available).
• Compose the shopping list.
• Specify the extra budget (say 5%).
• BeCOOLess will inform about alternative shopping lists, their cost, and their CO₂ savings.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are impressed that we made the App effectively work (we didn't believe we would make it in such a short time). Also, we solved one of our personal pains, and this is something to be proud of.

What we learned

There were many skills that every member of the group learned along with the development of this project. But most importantly, we learned that a good team can make a huge difference to the world!

What's next for BeCOOLess: Your CO₂-aware shopping list assistant

Built With

• angular.js
• audacity
• canva
• cherrypi
• customapi
• figma
• heroku
• javascript
• mongodb
• postgresql
• postman
• pymongo
• python