EcoSwitch

Inspiration

Our inspiration for this project came from the growing need for sustainable shopping solutions. Sustainable shopping solutions are crucial because they help reduce environmental impact, promote ethical consumerism, and encourage businesses to adopt eco-friendly practices. Many consumers want to make responsible choices but lack transparent information. Our project empowers users by providing sustainability insights, suggesting better alternatives, and making it easier to shop responsibly both online and in-store.

What it does

This browser extension allows users to take a step back and decide what is important to them, money or the environment. EcoSwitch is designed to help a regular citizen of the internet learn more about their environmental impact by exposing them to sustainably made products

How we built it

This extension levreges an inbuilt feature of the manifest metadata file for chrome extensions that lets the extension know when the user is on an amazon webpage. Knowing this it calls a server set up using flask that allows the frontend to communicate with a backend based in pyhton. This python backend then utilises the gemini api in order to analyze product titles and descriptions to determine how sustainable they are.

Challenges we ran into

A big challenge was simply figuring out the workflow of how everything should work. Our team was very inexperienced so it took a bunch of research to even figure out how to make a browser extension in the first place!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One of the best things about this project is that it allowed us to get our hands dirty with the nit and gritty of web development and the reality of programming. While we may have heard of terms such as front-end and back-end before, actually putting it all together and learning all the steps was a whole other experience that was really satisfying to be a part of.

What we learned

We learned the true workflow of software engineering! in our classroom environments typically we are working in a very closed sandbox, but in this hackathon we had a whole world of possibilities! Learrning how to find an API, and then learning the documentation for that API in the same day in order to figure out how to make it do the things we needed was a great preview towards what we imagine the life of a software engineer to be

What's next for EcoSwitch

There is a lot of development left for Eco Switch! Originally we wanted to include an AI chat feature that can give the user a more streamlined experience for finding the sustainable products they wanted.

Further more, increasing the scope of the project to be able to search through webpages outside of amazon is definitely on the todolist. Maybe even creating a smartphone app or even a dedicated website so those less tech savvy can still get the benefits of sustainable shopping would definitely be a great benefit for the prospect of EcoSwitch

Built With

• flask
• gemeniapi
• html
• javascript
• python
• webscrapper