Inspiration
A modern-day carbon footprint is likely to be larger than one perceives. With all of the carbon emissions that go into producing the products we buy and all of the purchases made related to food, shopping, and other categories, we wanted to create a product that expressed an estimate of one's carbon footprint based on their purchases. Increasing awareness for our effect on the world through our purchases opens up the opportunity to host a more sustainable approach to developing our lifestyles.
What it does
CreditCarbon utilizes a MasterCard API to convert bank transactions into carbon emissions values. The calculations involve converting Merchant Category Codes (MCC), which are categorical labels of any transaction that describes the kind of purchase made (e.g. MCC 2065 - Electrical Parts & Equipment, 5462 - Bakeries), to an associated carbon emissions value that are generated through evaluations of the machinery and technologies that were utilized to generate the product.
How we built it
We first composed of design propositions of each page of the website base our implementations off of. The mock-up thoroughly streamlined our front-end and back-end development skills to structure the website in an elegant manner. We then connected to the API and plugged in a cord between the application and our website. All that was left was to make everything look pretty.
Challenges
Our primary challenge came in the form of the Mastercard API requiring every payload to be encrypted due to the security and privacy necessities surrounding credit card histories. We had to figure out how to manage the encryption and decryption of the transactions, which proved to be an excruciatingly difficult task.
Accomplishments
We are extremely proud of our front-end implementations that led to a beautiful website design. Constructing initial mock-ups of the website was a great success and we are all ecstatic with the way everything looks.
What we learned
There are numerous open-source projects and resources such as APIs in the public domain that are not being utilized to their fullest potential. We were elated with our work with the Mastercard API, though there is much more for us and everybody else to do in realizing the opportunities of online implementations.
What's next for CreditCarbon
We would love to create a more cohesive summary of each of the four MCC categories - food, shopping, entertainment, and transportation - that we targeted in our displayed results page. Adding a scrollable list that matches each individual transaction with an associated carbon emissions value would further contribute to the website's ability to reveal to users the specifics of the relationship between their spending and their carbon footprint.
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