Equipping consumers with the knowledge they need to shop sustainably
Equipping consumers with the knowledge they need to shop sustainably
The UN Environment Programme estimates that roughly half of greenhouse gas emissions and 90% of biodiversity loss is caused by the extraction and processing of materials, fuels and food for creating consumer goods.
At GreenItUp, we believe the root of the problem is that consumers do not have easy access to the true environmental costs associated with their purchasing decisions. GreenItUp is a browser extension that instantaneously analyzes the contents of a user’s online shopping cart. Based on GreenItUp’s database, our solution will offer more sustainable alternatives that are comparable to items the user is looking at and still within their budget.
GreenItUp is a browser extension that looks at products in a user's online shopping cart and offers comparable substitutions that are more sustainable yet still within their price range. We use the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to compare products. The LCA is an environmental accounting approach that considers all the aspects of resource use and environmental releases associated with an industrial system from cradle to grave from the extraction of raw materials and the production and distribution of energy, through the use, and reuse, and final disposal of a product. GreenItUp will initially use carbon emissions as the key environmental metric. Every time a customer switches to the GreenItUp referred product, GreenItUp will receive commission from the retailer.
Check out our prototype on InVision.
We're graduate students at Columbia University who are keen to build things that make the world a better place. (Click on our pics for our LinkedIn pages.)
