eco₂mmerce

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💡 Inspiration

As ecommerce grows especially more prevalent and convenient in the age of Amazon, we have to consider the impact of shopping online and its high costs for our planet, with an invisible footprint left behind with each package. By 2023, it is estimated that the constant, rapid increase in delivery vehicles will result in an increase of 6 million tonnes of CO2 emissions, per earth.org.

To combat this risk, we created eco₂mmerce, a new way to intelligently learn about the effects of ecommerce directly, so users may be able to shop more sustainably.

💻 What it does

At eco2mmerce.tech, users will be able to calculate the invisible carbon footprint for each Amazon product. Users can view the amount of carbon emissions the product will produce based off of their location through our web application through eco2mmerce.tech.

Once the user has selected any Amazon product through the input, they will be able to receive an estimated effect of any purchase based on calculations aggregated based upon their location, nearest Amazon facility, manufacturer's country of origin, and the specifications of the product. This calculation accounts for many factors such as distance, weight, longitude and latitude, etc.

⚙️ How we built it

The client is hosted at the site eco2mmerce.tech while the API is hosted at api.eco2mmerce.tech

🧠 Challenges we ran into

• We ran into many bugs due to using a tech stack based upon 2 different languages that were not necessarily compatible (JavaScript and Python)
• Receiving data such as based on Amazon listings and location took some effort as that data was not easily accessible for privacy reasons

🏅 Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Implementing a working and functioning minimum viable product of our idea
• Developing both a React frontend and Flask backend simultaneously while collaborating and being able to deliver something where the two services are integrated well
• Deploying the live version of a demo that works as expected

📖 What we learned

• How to collaborate with developers in a remote environment through GitHub and Git
• How to create a React frontend that users can interact with through the UI
• How to make a Flask backend API to process requests

🚀 What's next for eco₂mmerce

• Implementing other calculation features to provide a more accurate estimate of environmental impact for shopping online
• Adding ability to calculate carbon footprint for products for ecommerce stores other than Amazon

Built With

• amazon
• docker
• flask
• javascript
• react
• typescript