GreenerShopper

Be a better shopper with GreenerShopper

Comment

Inspiration

Are you aware of how your Amazon shopping impacts the planet? We don’t much think about how our shopping impacted climate change, so this chrome extension can help you. Using this extension, users can become mindful of their impact on the environment.

Some interesting facts:

  • Amazon's package deliveries in 2017 alone emitted about 19 million metric tons of carbon, according to one estimate. (Ivantova, 2019)
  • Yearly average carbon footprint per person in the USA: 16 tons (Nature Conservatory, 2020)

What it does

The GreenerShopper is your greener shopping helper Chrome extension. When going through items on amazon.ca, the extension provides us calculation of the kilograms of CO2 emissions that is put into making and shipping this product.

How we built it

We used the following resources to build our extension: vanilla javascript, tippy.js library, an Amazon api (via Rainforest API), CO2 emissions list by product type (via json file).

Challenges we ran into

  • Obtaining a proper database/table of CO2 emissions by product. We worked with what we could find, see section above for details. We had to make adjustments to the raw data.
  • Gaining access to the amazon API. We were unable to use Amazon's paid rest api service, so we used a third party service, which limited amount of calls that can be made. We worked around this and generated multiple keys that could be used by the script.
  • Retrieving product id via hovering (div elements) on items.
  • Working with tippy.js library to generate a tooltip feature.
  • Managing multiple workstreams/branches & working virtually
  • Parsing dimensions within the product info to obtain the right CO2 emission data

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  • Started from scratch and finished!!
  • First time developing with Chrome Extension

What I learned

  • Find the correct product id that matched with product

What's next for GreenerShopper

  • Having a better source of data for CO2 emissions
  • Having a better calculation algorithm and give a better comparison for CO2 emission

  • Faster data loading of tooltip

  • image resource: https://www.flaticon.com/

Built With

Share this project:

Updates