CO2Pid

A Chrome extension that uses climate science to reveal the hidden environmental cost of your online shopping in dollars.

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Inspiration

Our team really wanted to focus on solving a real-world issue, but also creating a feasible and working solution within the time frame. On Thursday, the Trump Administration reversed the EPA's endangerment finding, which is the legal basis for federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions; what this means long-term is that there is even more of a lack of attention to the real issue of greenhouse gas emissions. For this reason, it is up to the consumers to decide to take action to help protect our Earth, or at least attempt to slow down the cycle of destruction. Given our constraints, we decided to focus on food production and consumption, and worked to find ways to increase the consumption of more sustainable options by educating consumers on the "hidden cost" of several frozen foods. Food consumption in particular, meat consumption, is heavily contributing to biodiversity loss and environmental damage. All of this led us to develop CO2pid.

What it does

CO2pid utilizes the standard way of measuring carbon emissions (the EPA's social carbon cost) as well as research papers to estimate the total environmental cost of several frozen food products. We spent most of our time perfecting an algorithm that accurately calculates such a score, and then displays it to the user, thereby creating a shocking visual that demonstrates how truly expensive even seemingly "cheap" foods may be. The Chrome extension scrapes your shopping cart, for instance, a Walmart cart, keyword-matches each product to its archetype, and injects the hidden environmental cost directly into the page. This is all client-side in under 50 milliseconds with zero API calls.

Additional Features

  1. Justice score: The frozen food industry is dominated by a handful of producers. These Big corporations' records on climate action and Labor practices are varied. So when a certain product is selected in the shopping cart, users can also view a justice score for the manufacturer behind it. The score is calculated from three Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) data sources, using a weighted average.

  2. Environmental Quick Tips: Users of the extension can find quick educational tips on best environmental practices by interacting with the CO2pid dashboard.

  3. Detailed Breakdown of our Hidden Cost Algorithm: Any user who is curious about any of the environmental dollar amounts associated with their shopping cart items can find a detailed breakdown of how the dollar amount was calculated by interacting with our "How we got this score."

How we built it

For the building of our MVP, the hidden cost algorithm: We built a three-layer emissions-to-dollars algorithm entirely from scratch. First, we constructed a database of 57 frozen food archetypes by pulling real ingredient lists from Walmart product pages and using the FDA labeling law (21 CFR §101.4), which requires ingredients listed by weight, to estimate percentage compositions. We validated these against USDA FoodData Central nutritional profiles. Each archetype's ingredients were then multiplied against per-kilogram emission rates from Poore & Nemecek 2018 (Science, 38,700 farms, 119 countries) across three dimensions: carbon, water, and land use. These environmental metrics are converted to dollars using the EPA's Social Cost of Carbon ($185/ton), Water Footprint Network scarcity pricing, and TEEB ecosystem service valuations. The Chrome extension itself is built with vanilla JavaScript, a content script that injects into Walmart's cart page, scrapes product names from the DOM, parses weights via regex, matches products to archetypes using a longest-match keyword scoring algorithm, and renders hidden cost badges directly inline with Walmart's UI. The entire database ships as a static JSON object inside the extension with zero external dependencies.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we encountered was how to determine the environmental cost of a shopping cart item in a dollar amount. Accordingly, a good portion of our time on the project was spent researching. We floated around a couple of ideas, including using a public food facts database and using API calls to a Carbon calculator source, before zeroing in on our algorithm.

Some of us were unfamiliar with the mechanics of developing browser extensions. So there was a learning curve associated with building something, but at the same time, understanding the needed tools.

As undergraduate students with responsibilities outside of the classroom, there was a juggling element to our work on the project. We had one team member who was commuting off campus to participate, one team member who was juggling work and the hackathon, and one team member who had to attend to family responsibilities while also working on the project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that, given the time constraints, we were able to come together, develop our solution to a real-world problem, and complete and submit a functioning product demo.

What we learned

Beyond learning about the technical aspects of developing an algorithm and a working browser extension, we learned a lot about sustainability, big Food climate practices, and the urgency of climate action towards our environment, during our research.

We learned much about using AI as an assistant to develop a functioning product, its shortfalls, and advantages.

What's next

We want to gain real users for our product, thus we are working on publishing our extension to the Chrome Store. Additionally, we are also exploring opportunities to market and spread the word about our product by talking to our Professors and academic contacts.

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