Eco-mpere

Inspiration

No tool, service and apis exist today that can help consumers and businesses measure ecological footprint of products and implications of metals used in them. This coupled with the challenge at hand provided a substantial opportunity to explore.

What it does

The idea is to tap into disparate data sources backed by scientific research, fuse them together to draw actionable insights and provide data as a service that can be consumed by variety of clients for numerous use-cases. We went one step ahead and pursued one of the use cases i.e. Smartphone comparison of ecological footprint to demonstrate the potential of this idea.

How we built it

First we made rough sketches of what sustainability factors users would be interested in knowing about their products. We discussed how this could be best represented graphically to make it easy to digest and visually appealing. Moreover, the idea of a comparison function between two products for their respective ecological features came up. After further refining our sketches we installed the bootstrap framework and collected the necessary data from the scientific articles we found and created a service out of them. Finally, we implemented highcharts to display to visuals in our tool.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was the fact that even after searching for a long time we could not find useful data sources for the ecological footprint of metals. To counter this problem we turned to the scientific world and used the aggregated data they had collected in their research. This turned out to be very useful data. The display of a wide variety of key performance indicators also caused some trouble since we wanted to make it as easy as possible for the user to evaluate the product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The fact that we have built something that doesn’t seem to exist yet and provide the user with a tool that can really help him/her to make more conscious decision about their purchasing decisions.

What we learned

How to reduce complexity from scientific resources and structure their data for data as a service purposes.

What's next for Eco-mpere

Expand the product database with other products and their constituents. Expand the dashboard with more information about the ecological footprint of the product.