Billow

Empowers individuals to offset their climate footprints by tracking carbon emissions produced from deliveries, rides, and flights.

Comment

Inspiration

The rise of the gig economy due to the popularity of apps like Uber, Doordash, and Instacart has delivered convenience to consumers. However, such apps have also brought a heavy increase in carbon emissions. According to a study conducted by USwitch, if you spend $70 a week on food deliveries, your carbon footprint is a whooping 450% higher. Additionally, food transport constitutes 19% of food emissions, or 6% of total carbon emissions.

While businesses themselves have a responsibility to decrease carbon output (and may be forced to due to EU regulations), we as consumers can also take measures to reduce our personal footprints and offsetting the emissions from our deliveries, rides, and flights would go a long way.

Billow is a fast and easy way for users to make donations to climate change charities proportional to the carbon emissions produced by their Uber rides, Doordash orders, Southwest flights, etc.

What it does

Billow is a Chrome extension that monitors your email inbox. When you receive an email receipt from a delivery, ride, or flight, Billow parses the receipt and determines the amount of carbon produced using models informed by research studies. Billow then calculates the donation needed to offset the emitted carbon and allows the user to donate to one of 4 climate change charities (Carbon180, Clean Air Task Force, Cool Earth, or Rainforest Alliance). Finally, Billow tracks and displays the total pounds of CO2 emissions the user has offset with their donations.

How we built it

We built the email processing functionality using the Gmail.js API and the DOMParser. The frontend of the extension was built with React.

Challenges we ran into

Many of the methods of Gmail.js are deprecated, so it was a challenge to figure out workarounds. react-router has undergone changes and no longer neatly works within Chrome extensions; it was a challenge to determine that MemoryRouter is the solution.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Consistently being able to correctly parse email receipts!

What we learned

Ian didn't know React and learned it over the course of the hackathon! We both weren't familiar with the process of developing a Chrome extension and built a working one!

What's next for Billow

Potential extensions to Billow's functionality include:

  • Using techniques from NLP and data science to built an advanced model for determine the amount of carbon produced by deliveries, trips, and flights
  • Support for more email receipts! (other airlines, grocery delivery apps, etc.)
  • Payment integration with Stripe
  • Gamifying the experience to provide rewards (i.e. apparent like tentree for users that offset certain amounts of carbon

Built With

Share this project:

Updates