EcoTag

Login Page
Total emissions during transport
Manufacturer Home
Product Description

Inspiration

We as consumers judge a product in multiple ways. It can be its reviews, ingredients, or even how it appears. But there exists no proper information about the environmental impact of a product for consumers to judge it on.

As developers and entrepreneurs, we embarked on a journey to change this and provide a platform for manufacturers to add and improve their products while providing consumers an efficient way to know how effective this product is.

We also took into consideration India's auditing/inspection system which is still run majorly on paper. To prevent this, we also propose a unified national/global repository of auditing forms that can be standardised and used anywhere.

What it does

The application titled EcoTag has three main components/users, those are: Consumers, Manufacturers and Inspectors/Auditors.

Each of the following user has the following abilities:

Consumer

Scan a product and know its ecoTag
Generate an ecoTag even if the product isn’t present in our database
Ability to search through text or through image
Learn various methods of recycling depending on the product scanned
Find nearest NGO’s and Recycling center to donate
Find daily tips and advice to move towards an environmental friendly lifestyle

Manufacturer

Central character around whom our project first began
They have abilities to add and know a product’s emission, ecoTag and its shipping details. Adding a product shall provide the manufacturers a certificate from HelloWorks.
They have the ability to gain access to a repository of Suppliers through which they can improve their production processes
Instant access to travel tracking to aid in reverse logistics
Pointers from the application that could potentially aid them in either their manufacturing processes or waste management processes

Inspector

Provide a platform for inspectors to dynamically create forms and enter data for the factory they are inspecting
Access these forms created by other inspectors as well
Know and find the right form for the relevant manufacturer
As forms shall accumulate, we shall realise the forms that are getting the most hits and can then potentially be set as a standard process of inspecting for that respective industry
Adding a form shall give them a form to sign from HelloSign

How we built it

The application was built using Flask(Python), HelloSign Python SDK, Redis, MongoDB, Flutter while hosting the instance on Microsoft Azure.
EcoTag is calculated for every product using a statistical and categorisation NLP model. A product's top 5 categories are identified through this model that was trained on Amazon's product data. These categories are used as a 'categoryID' and all the product's emissions in this category are compared to generate an EcoTag.
We use Climatiq to find total emissions of a product from its cradle till it reaches production.
We scrape necessary barcodes and supplier information to give all the necessary details when required.

Challenges we ran into

Creating a statistical model was a hassle as we wanted to give the first added product as a rating of 5. Then every product from then should have a dynamic rating calculated through precise statistical model.
Converting our backend hosted API to https from http to add that extra layer of security
Finding an ideal UI design for an app involve multiple

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Succeeding in scraping some data available across the internet that we used to fill our DB with
Making the statistical and NLP model work well together
Building a beautiful UI for all the possible screens
Successfully integrating both HelloSign and HelloWorks into our application
Managing to implement Redis for caching
Encapsulating a global consumer ecosystem within an application