Green online shopping with EcoCart

What's your background? (tell the story of who is working on it)

I've always had the entrepreneurial spirit. The last business I started was an online peer-to-peer rental marketplace business. You can think of it like Airbnb, except instead of renting someone's home, you can rent their surfboard, snowboard, drone, bike, etc. We built the business because we felt that renting, in stark contrast to consumption, was a far more significant net benefit for the environment, especially with high-plastic items like kayaks. After a while, it just became incredibly complicated and expensive to be a sustainable brand, so we set out to build EcoCart. Our mission is to make the fight against climate change easy, affordable, and accessible so that everyone can do their part.

What does your extension do exactly? How does it help users?

EcoCart for Chrome automatically calculates the carbon footprint of online orders, then offsets that impact by buying carbon offsets. Search on Google and EcoCart will let you know which stores support sustainable shopping, or search directly in the EcoCart extension and find your favorite brands including Glossier, Petco, Levi's, UGG, and more.

When you make your order carbon neutral with EcoCart, we offset the environmental impact of your order, so you can rest easy knowing your orders get to you without hurting the Earth. When you make your orders carbon neutral, you'll earn EcoPoints for Earth-saving rewards like planting trees, or for cash back at your favorite stores.

How it works here:

Which browsers do you support?

Chrome is now officially live and Firefox is coming soon!

What motivated you to get started?

The hundreds of brands that use EcoCart's Shopify app are seeing, on average, over 30% of their orders made carbon-neutral by end customers. This can range up to over 50% with some merchants.

Given consumers' clear desire for carbon neutral shopping, we figured it was the perfect opportunity to tackle a larger market, develop a consumer product and thus came EcoCart for Chrome.

How are you planning on promoting your extension?

We're relying a lot on word of mouth. People saving the planet with their normal purchases is something we feel people want to share. So we're giving people the tools they need to share EcoCart with their friends - and even rewarding them with EcoPoints and trees planted for each friend they refer.

What are some of the challenges or limitations you've encountered in building the extension?

We set out, quite naively without much of a technical background, to build software products to make the world a better place. Throughout the course of building the extension, there were many challenges we faced.

One in particular was building the algorithm to accurately estimate carbon emissions for all online purchases, and another was selecting where the best projects to support with the carbon offsets we are buying. We spent months and months researching, consulting with climatology PhDs, and compiling data sources to ensure our algorithm was as accurate and robust as possible. Turns out, if you care about something deeply enough, you'll be surprised at how it will drive you.

What goals do you have for the future?

We want to give as many people as possible the opportunity to shop carbon-neutral. We are focused heavily on growth now and will continue that focus for the foreseeable future. We are truly building a suite of products that make the fight against climate change easy, affordable, and accessible so that everyone can do their part.

Where can readers go to learn more about you and your projects?

You can find more information on our website EcoCart.io. We also keep a blog about sustainability and EcoCart itself. In the spirit of transparency, we publish a list of carbon offset projects we support too.