Carbonift

HD Video: carbonift.com/tutorial

Inspiration

Many businesses know they want to reduce their carbon footprint. They may put in tons of effort into realizing how much carbon their facilities are producing and emitting to the atmosphere. However taking action on this type of emissions requires more than data and decision making.

Carbonift focuses on your emissions down the supply chain. Better understanding the impact the suppliers you purchase from and the impact that they are having on the environment can lead to a reduced carbon footprint from optimizing who you do business with.

What it does

Carbonift is a monday.com board view app that takes in spend and supplier data from your board and presents it in a flow chart. It displays the amount of carbon your current supplier is emitting based off your spend through them and even does the same for some potential alternate suppliers. Using this information users will be able to choose to do business with suppliers who help them reach their carbon footprint goals.

How we built it

The board view is made with React and the React Flow library. Monday's GraphQL api was used to both query and mutate the main table to pass data to the flow chart and back to user for persistence. The Carbon emissions predictions use an api called DitchCarbon, and the the alternative company suggestion uses AI to determine reasonable and relevant alternates. The back end functions are hosted in AWS Lambda and are completely serverless. Monday's key value cache is used to prevent repetitive calls to the lambda functions and improve performance.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was creating an app that seamlessly integrated with Monday. It was of huge importance for the app to be very easy to set up and not have many requirements. We wanted this to be used with any existing purchasing table with relative ease. Making the alternative recommendation engine was very challenging in figuring how to use the item name and the current supplier to best suggest alternates. The most difficult aspect was developing code to work with backend calls with a super slow response time, and figuring how to manage state to give the user a seamless experience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of the flow chart UI, and how intuitive it is to use. The goal of the visuals make lots of sense. The conclusions that a user can draw are very clear and it may even suggest suppliers you have never heard of. In addition the range of products you can input is almost limitless from something physical like a battery to even services like technology consulting.

What we learned

This was my first time working with a GraphQL api and there was quite the learning curve but I really see the value in what benefits it provides. In addition seeing how Monday runs their app's marketplace was very insightful. I appreciate how you can submit any web based app, and there are not many if any limits to what you can do. In the process of working with all the data and visual components I learned a lot about React state and rendering.

What's next for Carbonift

Carbonift is something I really want to expand upon and improve. I think Monday has so much potential with business logistics and more niche use cases. The opportunities are really endless and Monday provides a string base and backbone to build super powerful tools. Carbonift will be made to integrate with existing systems that companies use to automate the process and became the easiest way to start reducing carbon footprint.