Green Basket

Helps you make educated shopping decisions to promote a better climate!

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Inspiration

There are some obvious ways we affect our climate every second. We all make a conscious decision to walk, bike, or drive, and the choice we make affects our carbon emissions. This aspect of our lives has already been explored in various ways, so our team thought of more innovative, less commonly considered parts of our carbon footprint. This created Green Basket. Green Basket is an extension that helps educate you on corporate sustainability, and what kind of companies you support.

What does Green Basket do?

Whenever you are about to make a purchase on Amazon, we first find the name of the seller on the page. Then we use that name to pull up sustainability information on that company. Finally, the results of that query are displayed in a readable, clear way on your window.

We are submitting this project for various tracks including the Mystery prize, the Honorable Mention, and the Google Cloud Platform challenge.

How did we build it?

Each of our project's parts required a different technology, so our team required a lot of delegating and management. Some of the ways we built it included:

  • HTML & Javascript for the extension base
  • CSS to enhance the appearance of our pages/text
  • Google Cloud SQL, Storage, and App Engine to easily access and store the company information
  • Python & Flask to parse and host important parts of our project

Challenges we ran into

Parsing and accessing the information we needed proved to be difficult. The information was either hidden by security or required a fee to access. In addition, hosting what we needed to created errors we did not expect. In the end, by regrouping with the team we were able to fix many of our issues.

What we learned

We have learned a lot after this hackathon process. Some of our take aways are:

  • Research and education is key, in brainstorming and life
  • After dedicating time to it, Google Cloud Platform rewards a user with powerful tools

What's next for Green Basket

We would like to acquire and analyze more company data, and try to spot trends. That way, we could present in the future suggested brands or advice about the company. Another idea is to track how companies are improving/worsening, so a customer can have a more solid decision base.

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