offset__

Passively offset your carbon footprint.

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offset__

A Chrome extension that will spend an additional 1% of every online purchase towards offsetting your carbon footprint (via Cloverly) as you shop online.

Inspiration

According to the Earth Institute at Columbia University, we need to remove 100 gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere to "avert the most catastrophic effects of climate change". We need to reduce our emissions and offset whatever we can't reduce. Some ways to offset carbon footprints include:

  • Funding sources of renewable energy

  • Capturing and burning greenhouse gases.

  • Carbon sequestration

According to the NYTimes, it can cost just $3.30 to offset one ton of carbon. There's some websites that let you purchase carbon offsets (e.g. carbonfund.org) but very few people know about them and even fewer contribute to them.

What if there was a passive, easy way for all of us to offset our carbon footprints?

Link to the slides

What it does

A chrome extension that will passively spend an additional 1% of every online purchase on offsetting your carbon footprint.

How I built it

Challenges I ran into

  • Some of the sites I was using to test stopped loading (presumably because their network thought I was an attacker for refreshing the webpage too many times).

  • CSS issues because the CSS of a content script is not isolated from the CSS in a web page

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

This works on jet.com (online shopping) and aa.com (booking flights)

What I learned

  • An overview of browser extensions' architecture and affordances

  • Learned about carbon offsets

What's next for offset__

  • Finish the payment stuff

  • Make the extension work on multiple sites. Businesses could upload a offset.config.json file to their websites where the file would state the url of the checkout page and the id of the HTML element containing the order cost. The extension could make a request for this file for each site so that it could automatically grab the order cost without having to hardcode anything.

Built With

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Updates

posted an update —

Users only need to install the Chrome extension and set up their payment method through the extension. After that, the extension will spend an additional 1% of every online purchase towards offsetting their carbon footprint.

The extension will notify the user when the extension is purchasing a carbon offset and there's a "Cancel" button so users can opt out for specific purchases.

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posted an update —

If every online shopper used this chrome extension, we could offset 3 billion tons of carbon per year (~2 billion from e-commerce and ~1 billion from booking flights).

These numbers will only go up as the cost of carbon offsets decreases, the e-commerce industry grows, and more flights are booked. In less than 30 years, we could offset enough carbon to avoid catastrophic events due to global warming.

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