PayBack

Track

We're applying to the Environment track.

Inspiration

We're beef jerky enjoyers, but realized that beef can be very harmful to the environment in its carbon emissions. However, most products other than beef also contribute to carbon emissions, and we wanted a quick and easy way to counteract that.

What it does

PayBack allows users to instantly pay an offset value to a number of green charities as they shop. It webscrapes Amazon to calculate the carbon offset using the product's weight, type, location, and delivery time. Then, PayBack automatically donates the money to a charity with Checkbook's API.

How we built it

We started by looking at Chrome's extension docs. We divided work into frontend and backend teams—some worked through putting together the extension, and others worked on the calculations needed to produce a dollar value based on the item's parameters.

Challenges we ran into

Chrome extensions can be finicky. It was difficult to run scripts in the right context, some running in the popup and others running within the webpage itself. It was hard to communicate information between the two.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of working through so many bugs when chrome extensions are hard to debug; we were mostly unable to log the bugs to the console, taking each step one at a time.