Sustainable Shopping

Be an informed, sustainable shopper when choosing brands

Knowing the details about individual manufacturers' sustainability practices is a huge barrier to making more informed purchases while at the store. Over a dozen organizations publish their own ESG (Environment, social, and governance) ratings, each using their own metrics. Much of this data is inaccessible to the average user, as it is either too complex to understand without a technical background or is hidden behind a paywall.

Our app was designed as a tool for people hoping to shop a little more sustainably with minimal effort. After scanning a bar code, our app would return an aggregation of scores from freely available sustainability records and display an easy-to-understand number on a scale of 100, with a link to read the sources of data directly.

Challenges

1. We weren't able to find enough mostly-complete data sets that effectively covered major manufacturers, such as Nestle or Frito-Lay. That set a limit for how effective our app could be, because we would not have been able to provide scores for the vast majority of products scanned.

2. We were a small team of two working together for the first time. Android Studio gave us a few problems, which tied up our resources and hindered progress.

Built With

• android-studio
• google-mobile-vision-api
• java