GreenWallet

Introducing GreenWallet: (Almost) like PAYBACK, but for sustainable purchase choices - rewarding your employees with additional corporate benefits for each "green choice" they make.

Inspiration: There are a lot of apps out there (and probably also a few at this hackathon) that help people to save the world - promoting less food waste, allowing people to scan QR codes to get ingredient info, helping them to track their CO2 footprint. But very few people actually use these because for the majority, cheap and fast is still more important than environmentally sustainable when it comes to purchase choices.

And meanwhile, corporates are pledging climate actions and spending millions of Euros on making their businesses more sustainable - but who actually is "the business"? It's the employees, making "green" choices and being encouraged to do so, both on and off work. That's why we link our cashback-system rewarding shopping choices based on their degree of environmental friendliness to corporate benefits.

Corporates incentivize "green" choices - paying their deed to society to improve life on our planet and inducing behavioral change in their employees to act sustainably - also on the job, out of habit. At the same time, people have a real incentive to buy "green", as each choice boosts their eligibility for corporate benefits. Pretty neat, huh?

What it does: Just like with PAYBACK, the employee scans the barcode to his/her account at the cash register. We receive the purchase data - products and amounts - through the supermarket's data interface. Then, we calculate the environment score of each product bought - rating the environmental friendliness of it based on open data about production location, ingredients and degree of processing - and adjust the GreenPoints balance based on the amount spent on each product. The GreenPoints are then shown in our app, along with a detailed breakdown of each product and its environmental impact. Furthermore, GreenPoints are transferred to the corporate benefit system where they can be exchanged for promotional offers - for example at the participating supermarkets, but also, maybe, for an e-bike. Furthermore, we provide sustainable sales insights to the supermarket.

How we built it: We have developed our GreenWallet App in Kotlin and Java, built a backend hosted on MS Azure, and came up with a calculation algorithm for our environment score based on open food facts (https://de-en.openfoodfacts.org/) data.

Challenges we ran into: Getting the back-end to work on Azure - not the easiest task in this short amount of time. And coming up with a reasonable score calculation algorithm which behaves cosistently for different types of products and "truly" reflects their environmental friendlyness. Oh, and Java callback hell.

Accomplishments that we're proud of and what we learned: Not sleeping until making sure our app runs stable - while ourselves being unstable. Also, we learned that brainstorming with digital white board tools can be done (while still being a pain) and that there are great ways to organize and distribute tasks, even in a remote setting. And, of course - we all have our unique talents and thinking of smart task allocation can get you very, very far, even on just a hackathon weekend.

What's next?: Let's save the world with GreenWallet!!!