Carbon Cart

Inspiration

This project was inspired by our desire to use modern techonologies to help inform everyone make better environmental decisions. Through the popularization of online shopping over the last decade, there has never been a more important time to increase consumer knowledge regarding the carbon footprint of individuals. It has become much easier to buy things at the click of a single button, which has hidden the environmental impact behind a consumer's purchase. Many clothing factories such as Shein and Temu exploited poor underage workers for financial gain. Through Carbon Cart, we help the user understand the impact of their purchases on the environment, to help the user make a more informed decision.

Thinking beyond a Chrome extension, we found an opportunity to use OpenAI's API to augment consumer knowledge and create a connection between environmentalism and consumers.

We came to see a use case in the promotion of providing otherwise reveal otherwise hidden information to help benefit the environment. By getting people more involved in understanding the carbon footprint behind their purchase, we are able to create not only those interactions, but also create a call to action for change.

What it does

Carbon Cart analyzes the product the consumer is looking at on a website, and returns the total estimated carbon emission from the production, the delivery, and the waste produced by the manufacturing of the item.

How we built it

We utilized Beautiful Soup to scrape information of products on the user's screen. After, we used Fast API to integrate the backend into the extension. To calculate the total carbon dioxide emission of a product, we called the OpenAI API to efficiently estimate a number.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest part was that we both have little to no coding experience, as we are a econ major and a data theory major. As a result, even cloning the repository was difficult, and there was a struggle in finding out the various quirks and mechanisms of the various API's we used. Furthermore, bug fixing was very difficult because two of us have never taken a CS class. We got a lot of help from various tutors to help us understand what we needed to do in order to finish our product. The UI was difficult to work with, and we had to read various tutorials to properly display our mock up of what we originally had planned.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are all very proud of our ability to overcome adversity, and how we conquered the various challenges of learning how to code. We found it very rewarding how we were able to brainstorm and complete something that we feel can have a positive impact on the environment. Furthermore, integrating the different aspects of our product was challenging and something that we found not intuititve.

What we learned

The most important thing we learned was simply one thing: how to code! Hack on the Hill was a great opportunity to increase our coding ability, and a great way for us to challenge ourselves in areas we were not comfortable with. Learning the intracacies of the various API's, we learned how each element of a code works with each other.

What's next for Carbon Cart

Due to time constraints, we were not able to add everything we would have liked to add. One feature we would like to add is a way for users to donate to help combat against carbon emmissions. Furthermore, we could also improve the UI so that the user can customize the placement of the button, and control various elements regarding information displayed on the screen.

Built With

• chrome
• fastapi
• javascript
• openai
• python
• react