Inspiration
It is clear to all that we are in the midst of a climate crisis. Greta Thunberg's Fridays for Future demonstrate that consumers are passionate about playing their part in reducing their carbon emissions. The issue is that currently there is no quick and easy way for consumers to get carbon emissions data for products while browsing online. This prevents them comparing the options and taking this factor into account when choosing which product to buy - introducing... CARBONara!
What it does
We have developed a web extension that helps consumers quickly and easily make an informed decision about the products they buy by directly showing them the carbon-equivalent emissions released below each product listing on Amazon. Additionally, we have developed a popup window which tracks the items in the users basket, and calculates the total carbon emissions for their entire order, giving consumers the environmental data they always wanted at the click of a button. In order to gamify the web extension, the popup window also displays an animated pet duck that reacts emotionally to the emissions produced by the items in the users basket, encouraging the user to reduce the carbon emissions of their order to increase the happiness of the duck. To further gamify our system, it stores each users total greenhouse gas emissions across all orders placed on Amazon, with this data being used to form a leader board allowing the user to compete against their family and friends to have the lowest carbon footprint possible.
How we built it
There are two major parts to our project; the frontend and the backend.
We used Python, Flask, and the Ditch carbon API to implement the backend. We used JavaScript to scrape the product information from Amazon such as the product name, manufacturer, and price, and then this data is passed to the backend which makes a call to the Ditch carbon API to retrieve the emissions of each product. This information is then passed back to the frontend where we add the carbon-equivalent emission data to the Amazon page next to each product in the search results.
For the frontend (web extension pop-up window) we used JavaScript, React, TypeScript, Redux, HTML, and CSS.
Challenges we ran into
We initially had some difficulty with extracting the product information from Amazon such that it included all of the information needed to call the Ditch carbon API. However, after a little pair programming, we worked through it and figured it out! We were able to extract enough information from various metadata tags on the Amazon website.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We’re incredibly proud that we made an application that can help people make more informed, eco-friendly decisions in a fun, interactive way. We’re pleased with the speed at which we designed our popup, the content we included and the way it looks.
What we learned
We learnt a lot about environmental data and how it can be used to inform users. We also learnt about web development all while developing our Python and backend development skills. But most importantly, we learnt a lot about teamwork, especially regarding sharing code via GitHub and managing time.
What's next for CARBONara
Some of the products on Amazon don't have a specified manufacturer in the product description which means that we are unable to find out the emissions data for these products. In order to solve this we developed some code using ChatGPT to work out what the manufacturer is of any product on Amazon using the product name and description. However, due to the fact we would have to buy credits to use ChatGPT to test our code, we weren't able to get this feature working, but we would love to do so!
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