CarbonKarma

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  Popup

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  Dashboard

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  Annotations

CarbonKarma is a browser extension that is designed to inform users of the carbon emissions that are tied to the production, packaging, and transport of things they buy online. We annotate Amazon products with the carbon emissions so that shoppers are informed of how their shopping impacts the environment.

Inspiration

Almost everyone uses Amazon these days to shop for products online. What many people do not think about, however, is the impact of their shopping on the environment. This has caused a 15% annual growth in e-commerce, and with that, many more boxes and packaging waste used in shipping. For EarthxHack, we decided to build a Chrome Extension that puts the environmental cost in the forefront of the user's mind as they shop.

What it does

CarbonKarma integrates seamlessly with a user's shopping experience. It displays the carbon cost alongside the price, so the user sees exactly how much cost on the environment that this item has. Shoppers can also click into the icon in the top right, which shows the breakdown of the cost, including Manufacturing, Shipping, and Packaging. There is also a carbon equivalent conversion to common items like number of miles driven, burgers eaten, and hours used by a lightbulb. As shoppers add items to their cart, they are also added to our CarbonKarma dashboard. The dashboard shows the same carbon cost information, but now also shows ways to donate to charities to offset the carbon. We included highly vetted charities such as Cool Earth, Environmental Defense Fund, and National Geographic. After donating to these charities, the user can see their carbon offsets over time shown at the top of the dashboard!

How we built it

We built this project using the framework for Google Chrome extensions.

Video link: https://youtu.be/1-DsUATPh0c

Challenges we ran into

It was sometimes difficult to use plain JavaScript without any libraries to achieve the functionality we wanted.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have a functional Chrome Extension that anyone can use and get a better sense of their carbon emissions from shopping!

What we learned

We learned how to make a Chrome Extensions and also a lot about how much we impact the environment when shopping online.

What's next for CarbonKarma

We want to add more detailed breakdowns of the product manufacturing!

Built With

• bootstrap
• chrome
• javascript