Neutrify

Carbon Neutral + Nutrition = Honey for Sustainability

Comment

Inspiration

Did you know that every kg of beef releases 60kg of CO2 and costs 15,000L of water which equates to a swimming pool? We didn't until our research and we were shocked about how much impact consumerism has on our environment. Our team aspires to stop the accelerating trends of meat consumptions in developed countries while allowing more resources to be allocated to crops and vegetables to feed the poor.

We ran a survey during HTN and received almost 100 responses, where 93% of people indicated that climate change is a significant and urgent issue to work on. Many people wrote long paragraphs about their willingness to make a change but don't know where to start. This is where Neutrify comes in for salvation.

What it does

Neutrify is a chrome extension on Instacart that empowers users to understand their carbon footprint, based on what customers have in their shopping cart we determine how many CO2 emissions they will be producing, and offer ways in which we can help offset their purchase. We also suggest alternative meat sources like fish or Beyond Meat that they can buy instead to have a smaller carbon footprint while enjoying more nutritional benefits.

How we built it

For this chrome extension, we utilized a few different APIs and technologies. First, we made use of CockroachCloud, this gave us access to a database cluster where we were able to store user information including information such as carbon emissions, carbon offset, recommendations used, and login information. We also made use of Dropbase, here we had CSV files that contained information on different food products and their emissions per kg. In order to make use of the Dropbase API we attempted to use an email pipeline that would upload new CSVs to Dropbase after being emailed new versions of the CSV. We obtained data from the Environmental Working Group’s Meat Eater’s Guide and the EPA’s Guide to Passenger Vehicle Emissions.

We used a backend Node.js server in order to interact with CockroackCloud, then calls were made from the chrome extension to our backend server and to the Dropbase DB API in order to obtain information.

The chrome extension used message interactions between the context script, background script and popup script in order to take information from the website and send it to our chrome extension for further processing, such as the food items in a customer's cart.

Challenges we ran into

We had issues sending the information regarding a customer's cart to our popup script as the cart was hidden after a page had finished loading. In order to resolve this issue, we used the context script to inject the page with an event listener that would be notified when the cart opened which would respond by finding all of the elements in the cart and then sending them to our background script as an external message.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to figure out the interactions between the three different scripting stages for the chrome extension and the complex message interactions and figure out how to handle injecting our own script into the webpage in order to obtain the information we required. This is also the first time we've built a chrome extension and we're pretty happy with it.

What we learned

We learned a lot of new things about interacting with chrome extensions. We learned a large amount of APIs available for use, and the different usages between the background, context, and popup scripts. We learned how to pass information between these scripts as well as how to use a backend service in conjunction with the chrome extension. In addition, we were able to learn how to set up a CockroachDB cluster locally, as well as setting up a CockroachCloud instance. Similarly, we were able to learn how to set up a DropbaseDB.

What's next for Neutrify

We hope to flesh out the reward system so that customers have incentives to either plant trees to offset their carbon footprint, get discounts on Beyond Meat products or donate to charity after switching to more eco-friendly meat alternatives. With gamification, we will allow them to connect to their social accounts to compete with their friends and bring up a global green movement.

We hope to partner with more merchants to encourage them to produce foods with higher nutritional values and lower carbon emissions while bringing a healthier lifestyle for our consumers as they embark on this journey with us.

On a technical note, we hope to complete the email pipeline that utilizes the Dropbase API in order to update our food to emissions database. Ultimately, we plan to create an app with AR functionality that allows users to scan carbon footprints and nutrition values in the food that they purchase when the pandemic is over.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates