EcoScout

Inspiration

Many popular clothing stores aren't sustainable or ethical, causing detrimental harm to so many communities. People simply don't have the time or energy to go out of their way to research better alternatives while shopping. We wanted to close the gap between convenience and conscious consumerism by bringing the ethical alternatives directly to the user, the exact moment they need them.

What it does

EcoScout is a Chrome extension that acts as a shopping assistant to bring you the most up-to-datesustainability information on your favorite companies. When you visit an online clothing website, EcoScout reads the active URL and instantly cross-references the brand with our custom database. If you're shopping at a site that's unsustainable, we will provide recommendations just a click away!

If you are shopping on a fast-fashion site (like Shein or Zara), EcoScout throws a warning flag. When you open the extension, you are greeted with:

A Dynamic Sustainability Meter: visualizes the brand's overall Ethics and Sustainability metrics.
Curated Alternatives: instantly provides a list of sustainable, ethical alternative brands (like Patagonia or Pact) with direct, clickable links to their stores.

How we built it

Frontend: We built a responsive pop-up interface using React, JSX, and CSS.

Backend: We created a Python program to match the detected URL to brand names in our database and recommend links back to the user.

Database: We used Firebase to store our dataset of fast-fashion companies and their ethical/sustainable alternatives.

Challenges we ran into

Initially, we struggled to find a publicly available database that tracked fast fashion brands and their impact. After we decided to build our own, we introduced the challenge of accurately categorizing companies across various metrics.

Later in the project, we ran into significant hurdles connecting our React frontend to our Python backend. Also, navigating Chrome's extension security policies proved difficult, especially when attempting to actively capture the user's live tab URLs and render external links without triggering browser security blocks.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building a working MVP as an all-freshman team! We learned entirely new technologies on the fly to engineer a full-stack pipeline that processes live user data.

Creating a custom database of over 70 companies, meticulously categorizing fast-fashion brands and mapping them to ethical alternatives.

What we learned

For the front-end, we learned how to create a Google Extension, rendering our design, and then eventually implementing features that were able to access our database. For the back-end, we learned how to use the database Firestorm and access it with our Python program.

What's next for EcoScout

Some future advancements include:

Creating a bigger database to include a wider range of fast-fashion companies and alternatives.
Adding more criteria to our evaluation system of sustainable, ethical, and mixed ratings.
Adding tabs to provide more information to the user about the recommended companies.
Adding notifications that pop up whenever the extension notices the user is visiting a company in our database.