ECOFITS

Home Page
Browser Extension

Inspiration

The fashion industry makes up 10% of humanity's carbon emissions, is incredibly energy intensive, uses an incredible amount of water all while 85% of all textiles become waste every year. One large problem is that companies lack transparency and consumers struggle to make informed and environmentally conscious decisions. Many brands offer similar products at comparable prices, but some make a greater commitment to sustainability and the planet than others.

What it does

When browsing clothes shops online, each item is given a sustainability score based on a variety of factors including the carbon footprint of the company and the material (provided by DitchCarbon's API), the energy cost of material production, transport emissions etc. The extension then uses data from the site to search the web for similar items, assigns sustainability scores to them as well and presents the best options.

How we built it

The front end was built using html/css with a lot of the work being carried out to create a google browser extension. The backend was written in python where parts of the information needed to determine sustainability were retrieved using the DitchCarbon API. Requests and BeautifulSoup were used for web scraping to get further information and search for similar items.

Challenges we ran into

Complexity and inconsistency of webpages, scraping information from different sites required digging through vastly different structures. CSS being a pain. Lack of experience and online resources being unreliable. Lack of data on fashion specific CO2 emissions to manufacture textiles, emissions of different types of garments. Vague information on supply chains and manufacturing locations. Integrating our front- and back-ends.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building a working website and chrome extension. Successfully automating API requests and data retrieval through web scraping. Working through the night and persevering with our idea, while setting realistic and achievable goals.

What we learned

Learned a lot about our respective programming languages and web development, given our lack of prior experience. Interacting with APIs How big of an impact the fashion industry has on the environment and how much energy and water are used, and how much CO2 is emitted, to produce each item of clothing.

What's next for ECOFITS

Expanding web scraping abilities for the extension to be able to search through a large number of fashion web sites. Implementing Content Based Image Retrieval to compare images of different items of clothing to make sure that the suggested items are relevant to the user. Refining the functions for working out the sustainability score, adding more factors and fine tuning weightings.