Thank you for giving us the opportunity to present our project on Green Finance : MyCF
MyCF (My Carbon Footprint) is a mobile app built for HongKong’ese to measure their carbon footprint without the need of any physical hardware. Our app is built over a simple premise that when shopping, every responsible citizen can play a big role in reducing HongKong’s carbon footprint by simply scanning their shopping bills and generating a carbon footprint based on our AI capabilities. The users can also get rewarded in the process with 'whitepoints', cash rewards etc.
A research from University of HK's Earth Science Department found that the excessive appetite for meat is the main culprit to our high greenhouse gas emission (GHE) per capita. The results of the study show that if citizens adopt the governmental nutrient guidelines on meat consumption, we can achieve a 43% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, simply by adopting a healthier diet, the population can actually have a very important role in reducing greenhouse gas emission to the level required to reach the Paris agreement objective. The goal of the HK Govt. is to reduce the number from 6.2 (last recorded and assessed in 2014) to 4.5 by 2020 to meet these international objectives.
As tomorrow's citizens, we would like to help achieve this goal through our little venture. I hope you can all support us with this so we can bring the power of collaboration to all the young minds in Hong Kong and bring about a revolution to reduce carbon footprint.
For any project, it is important to have a logo that represents our vision and our project's mission. Here's our logo that encapsulates our goal with this app. By cutting down on grocery and buying alternative (recommended) items as part of your shopping, you can save a ton of carbon footprint by yourself. This contribution is what reflects through our logo with earthy colors.
- Abhishek Paryani (TL)
- Bikram Gangwar
- Terence Leung
And we are very proud to say that we are a team from HKUST, Clear Water Bay - Engineering School where we have just completed a 'Big Data Engineering' program.
What things you need to install the software and how to install them
import json
import os
import requests
import pandas as pd
import pickle
import flask
import flask_bootstrap
npm install -g expo-cli
Download the client:
https://docs.expo.io/versions/latest/introduction/installation/
Most of the libraries will be installed automatically with Anaconda. Flask needs to be installed separately by the following:
pip install flask
pip install flask_bootstrap
yarn
python MyCF.py
yarn start
MyCF (My Carbon Footprint) is an app built for HongKong’ese to measure their carbon footprint without the need of any physical hardware. Our app is built over a simple premise that when shopping, every responsible citizen can play a big role in reducing HongKong’s carbon footprint by simply scanning their shopping bills and generating a carbon footprint based on our AI capabilities.
A carbon footprint is the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions caused directly and indirectly by an individual, organization, event or product.
Age Groups and their preferences (based on our research about the Hong Kong market): • 23 – 33 Smartphone savvy millenials who have an environment conscience.
• 33- 50 Those people who are passionate about saving the environment and giving a safer environment to their future generations.
Tutorial / Splash screen when you start the MyCF app:
Since this is a projects that generates environmental benefits for Hong Kong residents, we are categorizing this as Green Finance.
- Citizens / residents / households do not have any understanding of their own carbon footprint
- There’s no motivation / incentive to save the environment
- Complex calculations to understand CF of products
Our solution is technology based with the front-end being an app that can be easily accessible to the public.
- A centralised database that stores an absolute value of a product (packed / manufactured) along with its carbon footprint.
- App provides a user-friendly UI to scan receipts/bills from grocery or capture text from digital receipts (like emails) and validate this against purchase (SMS, AliPay, PayMe etc.)
- Scalable systems that can be applied to other services like transportation (MTR), water & electricity, food delivery (e.g.: cutlery), electronics (disposable / recyclable ratings)
- Environment conscience app - Cuts consumption levels
- Gamification based on user generated data (peer pressure through social media)
- Inclusive (anyone with a smartphone that has a camera function)
- Scalable (AWS environment with Elastic Beanstalk) - This gives us an immense advantage when scaling the application.
- Proprietary algorithms to match item on shopping list with a direct carbon footprint number
- Generates data related to habits for environment improving reasons
- End-users (content generators) -- New -- Existing -- Lapsed
- Manufacturers (those who can reduce carbon footprint by changing manufacturing process)
- Mobile App
- SDK on Mini App on Payment Apps (AliPay, PayMe, WeChat Pay etc.)
- Website (to see advanced analytics on your CF)
- Reduction in CF month on month of our existing end-users
- Initial reaction to the app maybe that it makes you feel guilty
- Lack of carbon labeling on foods (packaged and non-packed foods)
- Plastic and other industries directly impacted and their strong lobbyists
- Supermarket chains opposing to data provided by the app
- Failure to generate revenue due to lack of adoption from end-users
With an idea and app today, there are bound to be direct and indirect competitors to your business idea. We have identified the following indirect competitors since none of them offer a real-time CF based on receipt scanning. Most of the apps are survey-driven that try to estimate based on user input, which we can all agree is not that most accurate form of providing the CF values.
- Oroeco - https://www.oroeco.com/
- Better World Shopper - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/better-world-shopper/id318369598 (Offers a static list of companies and their issues related to environment)
- Carbon - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/carbon-know-your-footprint/id1186053939
- offCents - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/offcents/id1241497942 (Only offers travel related Carbon Emissions)
- Data Monetization -- Lease data (anonymized) to consultants, NGO’s and Government entities on consumer habits and purchasing behaviour -- Lease data (anonymized) to manufacturers through our safe and secure dashboards
- Targeted ads with recommendations of alternative products (those products that are heavily vetted by our compliance teams)
- Partnership with Payment providers such as credit card companies (issuers), wallet companies (Google Pay, Apple Pay, Samusung Pay, AliPayHK, WeChat Pay etc.)
- Whitepoints (that can be converted into discounts, coupons, good conduct certificates etc.)
- Rewards (through payment providers like AliPay, PayMe, WeChat Pay etc.)
- Gamified Experience (leaderboards etc.)
- During the Alpha and Beta launches,
- Just like our challenge yesterday to get the fastest LinkedIn invite, we are going to throw a challenge to the user who gets the first ten installs. We have 150 people in the room - This would give us an approximate 50 users initially :)
- Force our friends to download the app and make them feel guilty of their own spending habits
- Launch the app via beta-program at HKUST University so this can reach a wider audience. HKUST just launched a hyper airpollution / AQI measuring app called PRAISE HK via the sustainability programs who is in partnership with WHO
- Design and Testing
- Channel testing
- Development
- Cloud Hosting Costs (AWS)
- Initial social media marketing
- Operational Costs
- Salaries (to feed us developers) 🐽 🐮
- AWS / Azure Hosting (at the moment, we are running this on our local machines)
- Technology stack (system architecture)
- Feature List
-
Core -- Scanned Receipts to OCR (English) -- Carbon Footprint Generator -- Immediate Score Generator -- Targeted Ads -- Message from co-founders (environment, privacy, data protection etc.) -- Survey to understand the end-user, their habits, shopping behaviour, and total spend per week and month along with their dietary consumption (meat etc.) (LINK)
-
Advanced -- Scanned Receipts to OCR (Chinese - Cantonese) -- Community Comparison (Mei Foo vs. Kowloon Tong vs. Ma On Shan etc.) -- Combine electricity and water carbon Footprint (like DEWA example) -- Show list of responsible merchants (Google, Apple, etc.) -- Suggest alternatives for shopping (beef vs. soy)
-
Experimental Features -- Conveyor Belt scan items -- Tailored Fun Facts within App (Curiously, texting creates less CO2 than a voice call; 1 kg of cheese generate the same amount of CO2 as a car travelling for 6 km) related to your shopping cart
- Add a full-fledged wallet management service module
- Connect to more payment types
Thank you to all the FINHACK organizers, Mentors, and Judges
- Entire FinHack Team
- Sponsors
- Eric RABIN
- Thomas DECOUVELAERE
- Jean Brice LOMBARD
- Maggie Law
- Karen Contet FARZAM
The End of Readme