Sustainability Shopping Companion

📝 Short Description

A browser extension that provides users with real-time information on a food product’s environmental impact through a sustainability score and suggestions for more sustainable alternatives.

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📦 Project Description

The project aims to help users make more sustainable shopping choices by comparing Amazon products with entries from the Open Food Facts API. On clicking a food item, the extension displays a simplified environmental rating.

We aim to make sustainability data visible and actionable at the point of decision-making. This reduces the burden on users to research environmental impacts and empowers informed purchasing with real-time, easy-to-understand scores from credible sources. Sustainable alternatives are suggested without requiring users to leave the page.

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❓ Chosen Problem Statement

Consumers often unintentionally support unsustainable practices due to a lack of clear information about the environmental impact of their purchases.
A 2023 McKinsey report found that 68% of consumers want to make sustainable choices but lack accessible and reliable information.

Design a sustainability shopping companion—a browser extension or mobile application—that provides users with real-time information about the environmental sustainability of brands and products as they shop online.
The app should offer alternative recommendations, detailed sustainability scores, and easy-to-understand visual indicators of environmental impact.
How would the platform ensure the reliability of sustainability data, encourage sustained user engagement, and balance comprehensiveness with simplicity for everyday use?

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🧩 Solution Overview

We provide real-time environmental impact data for products online, targeting Amazon food items initially. The goal is to nudge consumers toward more responsible choices by providing:

• Simplified environmental scores
• Alternative sustainable recommendations
• Credible, aggregated data at the point of decision

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⚙️ Technical Implementation (Architecture)

• Content Script: Intercepts clicks on Amazon product pages
• Background Script: Handles API calls and data processing
• Popup UI: Displays sustainability scores and alternatives
• Options Page: Stores user preferences

🔧 Tech Stack

Component	Technology
APIs	OpenFoodFacts API
Backend	Python / Node.js
Database	(None implemented yet for MVP)
Frontend	JavaScript, HTML, CSS

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🚧 Challenges & Learning Points

Initially, the goal was to assign sustainability scores to every product detected on a page using integrated APIs and a unified scoring engine. However, two major challenges surfaced:

1. Scalability: The volume of product data from online platforms introduced performance and infrastructure challenges.
2. Standardization: Different product categories have vastly different pollution metrics (e.g., food vs. electronics), complicating attempts at general scoring.

🔑 Key Learning Points

• Scalable Systems: Web scraping and processing must be horizontally scalable and cache-friendly.
• Data Abstraction: Environmental impacts need domain-specific normalization (e.g., separate logic for food vs. tech).
• Modular API Integration: Wrapping APIs in decoupled modules enables maintainability and flexibility.
• Score Normalization: Cross-API scores must be normalized to ensure fairness.
• Progressive Development: Start with a minimum viable product (MVP) in a single domain before generalizing.
• Trade-offs: Accuracy vs. usability must be balanced. Simpler scores often provide better user engagement.

Ultimately, we narrowed our focus to food products only and one e-commerce platform (Amazon) for a proof-of-concept MVP.

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🚀 Future Improvements

🌍 Environmental Expansion

We plan to extend scoring to cover four dimensions of sustainability:

1. Carbon Footprint
2. Water Consumption
3. Company Rating
4. Community Impact

🧮 Scoring Framework

• Weighted Scores:
  
  • 40% Environmental
    
  • 25% Social Responsibility
    
  • 20% Governance
    
  • 15% Economic Sustainability
• Normalization: Scale scores from different APIs to a 0–100 system.

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📊 Future API Considerations

🟩 Environmental Impact (40%)

API	Use
Climatiq API	Carbon footprint analysis
Trucost (S&P Global)	Carbon, water, waste data
Carbon Interface	Supply chain emissions
Ecoinvent	Lifecycle assessment (LCA)
OpenLCA	Open-source LCA tools

🟨 Social Responsibility (25%)

API	Use
SHDB	Labor and health risks in supply chains
Fair Trade API	Fair trade sourcing
Sustainalytics	Social impact and ethics
B Lab (B Corp)	Certified company social scores

🟦 Governance (20%)

API	Use
ISS ESG	Governance and board accountability
MSCI ESG	Ethics and anti-corruption
Refinitiv ESG	Executive pay, transparency

🟧 Economic Sustainability (15%)

API	Use
Bloomberg ESG	Long-term financial stability
FactSet ESG	Resilience and profitability data
SASB	Industry-specific metrics

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📐 Summary

This project is a step toward closing the information gap in sustainable shopping, especially for consumers who want to shop responsibly but don’t have access to accessible, reliable data.

By leveraging open data sources and modular software design, we’ve created a scalable, extensible framework that starts with food products but could evolve into a universal sustainability scoring companion.

Built With

• amazon
• css
• javascript
• openfoodapi
• python