Emissions Buddy

Earth's favorite Chrome Extension! This buddy will track your flight carbon emissions : )

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Inspiration for Emissions Buddy

Airplanes are one of the leading sources of CO2 emissions among all modes of transportation. It is one direct contributor to global warming. One long-haul flight is around fourteen percent of a gas car's annual emissions. Additionally, recent news came out about Taylor Swift's annual carbon footprint, which is 1,800 times the average human's emissions. This is because she takes frequent flights in her private jet. While it is within Swift's every right to travel in whichever vehicle she pleases, her emissions do concern us with the environmental impact that excessive air travel brings.

What Can Emissions Buddy Do?

Emissions Buddy is a Chrome Extension that will activate once the user is on the web page to book a flight. Currently, Emissions Buddy only supports Alaska Airlines and Delta Airlines. The Buddy will pull information on the website to calculate the total flight distance between the two airports entered. Then, the average total flight emissions will be calculated based on the distance calculated previously, the average number of seats based on the current fleet of plane models, average passenger load, average cargo load, average CO2 emissions through pre-production of kerosine and fuel combustion, cabin weight (based on what class you're sitting in), non-CO2 effects, and average aircraft and airport infrastructure emissions. Long-haul and short-haul flights are also specified when the distance is calculated (over 4080 km for a flight to be considered a long-haul flight). The final CO2 emission in kilograms is displayed on the extension, then is also fed into another equation to calculate the number of trees it will take for the emission to be offset within a year. The user can click a button whether they would consider changing their travel plans or not. If the yes button is clicked, Emissions Buddy will be happy a new Google search tab will open. If the no button is clicked, Emissions Buddy will be very sad. The no button can be clicked multiple times to generate a sad Emissions Buddy on the extension for each click. Finally, by default, the Emissions Buddy Extension has a button that will take the user to a helpful article on other easy ways to offset their CO2 emissions when clicked!

How We Built Our Buddy

The front end of Emissions Buddy was built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Our JavaScript uses the Chrome Extensions API to launch the extension and control its behavior based on user interaction. The backend was built with Python. We used the Flask, Pandas, and SQLite libraries in Python. These libraries allowed us to read data from large databases - one SQL and one CSV - and communicate the emission results back to the front end's JavaScript.

Challenges Encountered

For everyone on the team, this was our first time developing a Chrome Extension. This was also the first time most of us worked with SQLite, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Flask. Our biggest challenges were web scraping and parsing information from the airline websites. We had to write the scraping logic to find the user's start and end location in vanilla JavaScript because using a Chrome extension made integrating frameworks much more difficult. In doing so, we kept running into security measures that blocked us from getting the necessary data. Each website was also different in the way it stored information so we had to create new conditions to parse through information. This is the biggest reason why for the time being, we only were able to support Delta and Alaska Airlines.

Accomplishments

Our biggest accomplishment was creating a working extension. For all of us, we have never created a project of this size and complexity that completely worked within 24 hours so we are very proud of ourselves for that. On the front end portion of the extension, we are proud to create a simple yet aesthetically pleasing display given the time and knowledge of HTML and CSS we possess. Specifically, we think that the button animations that we implemented when the cursor hovers above them are very cool.

What's Next For Emissions Buddy

We would like to expand Emissions Buddy to other domestic airline websites such as Southwest Airlines and would like to support international airline websites like British Airways. We would also like to support different cabin class levels and the option to calculate for a round trip. In the long run, we would continue to develop more products around the "Emissions Buddy" brand to make it a staple icon in carbon footprint awareness.

Sources

  1. https://www.rd.com/article/which-is-worse-for-the-environment-driving-or-flying/
  2. https://www.myclimate.org/en/information/about-myclimate/downloads/flight-emission-calculator/
  3. https://climate.selectra.com/en/news/co2-tree#:~:text=Although%20the%20carbon%20absorption%20capacity,year%20for%206%20mature%20trees
  4. https://openflights.org/data.php

Contributors

  1. Ethan Sychanco: Sophomore; Computer Science and Engineering Major; Technological Innovation, Design Thinking, and Entrepreneurial Mindset Minor
  2. Alyce Wu: Sophomore; Computer Science Major; Graphic Design and Japanese Studies Minors
  3. Sean Lai: Sophomore; Computer Science and Engineering Major
  4. Andy Li: Sophomore; Computer Science Major
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