Eco-meter

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Inspiration

We realised how adverse the environmental effects of our purchases on e-commerce sites are, and decided to spread awareness about this issue. Eco-meter is browser extension for Google Chrome that estimates the environmental impact of products on Amazon.

What it does

The chrome extension conducts its activities in 3 phases.

It scrapes required product info, such as item category, weight, country of origin, materials and delivery address, from the product page on Amazon.
It feeds the data into a function that calculates the approximate quantity of air and water toxins that are released into the environment during processes such as mining, agriculture, manufacturing and shipping.
- It displays the output in the form of a popup on the browser window for the user to view.

How we built it

The extension is built primarily with JavaScript using open-source chrome APIs, with some HTML and CSS to design the popup that would be displayed to the user. The first step was to research the quantity of toxins released into the environment in the various processes involved in bringing a certain product to your doorstep. Having done this, we wrote a script to scrape relevant data from the Amazon webpage. Subsequently, we wrote another script to send the data to the popup, and display it with attractive UI.

Challenges we ran into

We first struggled to find reliable numbers from reliable sources about the environmental impacts of certain materials. Eventually, we found some useful statistics to help us from research papers and articles. Also, as this was the first web extension we developed, there were some structural issues and some problems in efficiently implementing the Chrome APIs. We have solved these issues as well in a short time frame.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Apart from this being the first web extension we have developed, it gives us satisfaction to draw attention to a largely ignored side-effect of the products we use. We largely look upon factories and the transportation sector as major sources of global pollution, however, think little about how our own purchases contribute to the same.

What we learned

On the technical side, we learnt how to build a web extension using various open source developer tools provided by Google Chrome. Another major takeaway from this project was becoming aware ourselves of how our daily purchases affect the environment negatively, and what we can do to curb it.

What's next for Eco-meter

After launching this extension on the Chrome web store, we look to expand the number of product categories our extension works on, and eventually develop it into a consumer platform, which will in turn raise awareness. In due course, we can also use the platform to pressure industries to publish detailed data about their carbon emissions, discharges into water bodies and other unsustainable manufacturing practices.