G.W.E.G.

Greatest. Web. Extension. Greg! He’ll inform you if a company supports unsustainable practices, as well as providing a gentle auditory alert for when you are on the site of such a company.

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Inspiration

92 million tonnes of textile waste is produced every single year, which is equivalent to tipping a garbage truck's worth of clothing into the landfill every SECOND. From these eye opening statistics and as the popularity of online shopping has increased to become the norm, we wanted to create something that informs online shoppers of whether a company they buy from are engaging in unsustainable practices and ask them to think before they buy.

What it does

After downloading this web extension, a pop up of the character ‘Greg’ will inform users of whether a company is unsustainable or not with his state of emotions. His usual state is happy. However, when users click onto the site of a fast fashion brand or an unsustainable company, ‘Greg’ will become distressed and an alert sound will play. We aim to appeal to the younger generation’s sense of humor with cute and relatable animations while also appealing to the general audience with the recognisable character from Edvard Munch’s painting, ‘The Scream’. Our end goal is to create smarter consumers and lead the next generation into thinking sustainably to protect our Earth.

How we built it

From guidance provided by the mentors and a lot of googling, we’ve managed to cobble together a basic prototype for our web extension. Using github as a base for our team to work together on the code we primarily used a javascript function to detect if this webpage is on our blacklist, if yes the gif will pop up and and alert sound will play.

Challenges we ran into

  • This is literally the first project we have made, like ever
  • We are first year students with only 6 weeks of coding experience in basic python
  • One of our members got covid
  • two members could only come in for 2 days
  • We have no idea we are doing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We have learnt a lot from this experience
  • We’ve created an interesting concept

What we learned

  • literally learnt java in 24 hours just for this
  • learnt how to use github (thanks to that one workshop, also thank you mentors!)
  • learnt how to make chrome extensions
  • learnt how to pitch and present a project
  • in general we learnt a lot about delegating work in a team project and coding in general (what an eye opening experience!)

What's next for G.W.E.G.

  • adding it’s own website
  • providing actual information and evidence of a companies practices about why they are considered sustainable or unsustainable
  • adding volume adjustment

Google slide presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-0PsP0UF0j7sPSBBvq62ItZwBMOZwC1E1rAKrPLTTIA/edit

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