Inspiration
This app was inspired by a desire to cut down on corporation green washing, or false advertising by using green, Eco friendly imagery and marketing. We wanted to create an app that would allow consumers to easily hold companies accountable and let them see what genuine environmentally friendly certifications a company holds.
What it does
To do this, our app parses environmental certification websites HTML files, and compiles that information on what companies possess what certifications. This information is then used in a web application our team designed to allow users to input any company name. This allows users to search for a company and see whether or not the company has earned any environmentally friendly certifications.
How we built it
The parsing element of our app uses a python package known as beautifulsoup4 to format website HTML into a tagged and easy to parse form, and then parse through those HTML to build a list of all companies that have earned that websites respective certification. We built the app portion of this program with python code on a website created using flask, a python web app framework. This allowed us to use HTML and CSS formatting to create a user friendly website that allows them to input the name of a company, and compare that with the lists of companies developed using HTML parsing.
Challenges we ran into
as first time users of web scraping software, there was a steep learning curve to finding the best way to parse through the HTML's of websites for the information that our app requires. There were also some difficulties with setting up flask and formatting it with CSS and HTML in order to make an app that is both visually appealing and easily usable.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that we were able to create a visually appealing web app in so short an amount of time, as well as being very happy with our new familiarity and use of web scraping, something that was unknown to all team members at the start of this project.
What we learned
Our team came in with very little experience outside of a small amount of python knowledge. This project required our team to learn completely from scratch how to format websites in HTML, and make them more visually appealing using CSS. We also had never used web scraping or parsing python script before, and learning and becoming comfortable with beautifulsoup4 was very exciting. knowledge of how to use Flask and python to create a navigable website was also new to most of the team, and very exciting to learn.
What's next for EcoCerch
Our team feels that EcoCerch has a lot of potential as a website to fight environmental green washing. Expanding the ability of EcoCerch to include a greater number of environmental certifications, and well as creating rankings on the website of companies that have been determined to be more or less environmentally conscious than others would allow consumers to use EcoCerch to become more informed about the companies they are purchasing from.
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