GreenStacks.

Website
Website
Website showing investments

Inspiration

Investing sustainably is an ever increasingly important concern of our generation and we believe that one of the fundamental ways to achieve this is by making information easily accessible to as many people as possible. Certain corporations are guilty of ‘greenwashing’ (falsely appearing more sustainable than they actually are) and it can often be bewildering to try to fathom what their sustainability reports even claim. We have therefore created a website which makes this process much more data-driven for investors.

What it does

We have displayed data from the CDP 2013 - Global 500 Emissions and Response Status on a website which will take information on portfolios and display the relevant information.

Breaks down the CO2 emission against the weighting of the portfolio in order to make investors easily aware of the impact of their investmets.

How we built it

Compiled information on ESG for the 500 companies by webscrabing with the adapted ticker symbols (see next section) and presented it in easy to read bar charts including colour coded ratings of each company. The website uses the users own portfolio via .csv file and then displays a series of pie chars, bar graphs using data from the CSG data base and from scraped databases.

Challenges we ran into

There were various challenges we were faced with, from innumerable coding errors to the fact that the data are 9 years out of date. We were also forced to create an artificial delay in our webscraping script to allow the scrip to take the ticker symbols and return the sector and a range of ESG data. The format of the ticker symbols in the yahoo finance database was different to the CDP so we had to create an algorithm to change these ticker symbols to computer readable symbols to allow the web scraping

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating a website with login and personalised portfolio data to aid with sustainable investments

What's next for GreenStacks.

We would like to monitor all users total ESG score and then provide users with a comparative rating on their sustainability i.e. 'Your portfolio is more sustainable than 70% of GreenStacks users' Implement the functionality of building the portfolio in the website with the data showing up as the positions are inputed