Team:CTR Alberta Canada/Software

Software

Ideation and Value Proposition

CO₂ EASY is a sustainable event planning software that was developed as a side project to Oxybegone. CO₂ EASY allows event hosts to create a unique event form that they can email to attendees. Attendees will then be able to open this link to calculate their CO₂ emissions for attending an event and the trees needed to offset their emissions. In addition, they are provided with an offsetting guide and a list of sustainable hotels and restaurants that they can utilize during their travels. We have coded a prototype for this application through HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP. You can view the coding at GitHub.

The idea for CO₂ Easy arose from comparing the CO₂ emissions of the in-person 2019 Boston iGEM Jamboree and the virtual 2020 iGEM Jamboree. Though our team was not able to travel to Paris this year for the Jamboree, upon research, we discovered that there were some significant benefits to hosting this event virtually.

To calculate the final emission values for the iGEM 2019 event, we calculated the total number of people from each country that attended the event and then multiplied that by the total kilometers from each country to Boston times two (for a round trip). Then, we found an average of the grams of CO₂ per kilometre per person that were averaged from annual reports for eight different airline companies. That average was 75.49 gCO₂/km/person. This calculation gave us a result of 7474.015028 tCO₂.

Estimates from the 2019 in person Boston Jamboree showed that airline travel from 45 countries and 6500 team members produces approximately 7500 tCO₂ emissions requiring over 300,000 mature trees per year to offset its impacts. Further analysis indicated that optimizing the location by moving the jamboree to Paris would reduce total GHG flight emissions by approximately 15%. Future hybrid attendance and a change of venue location would make the jamboree more inclusive and more sustainable.

However, iGEM is just a single event. Events are hosted all over the world every day, including conferences, competitions, among many others. It was this realization that inspired our team to develop a project that would increase awareness on event-driven greenhouse gas emissions, provide individuals and organizations with resources on how to offset their emissions, as well as a list of sustainable hotel and restaurant chains that they can support during their travels. Thus, we developed CO₂ EASY, an application that provides easy access to this information!

Our initial steps in developing this software were the following:

• Become more educated about what carbon offsetting is
• Attain mentorship for coding our application

Our team received very valuable mentorship for this project from experts such as the President of Sustain-Driven, Joey O’Brien. We interviewed Joey on December 9, 2020, in which he provided us with insight on what carbon offsetting entails and how we can incorporate this concept of offsetting into a software application.

Some of the valuable points of our discussion that greatly aided us with the development of our application include the following:

1. Joey had some suggestions on variables that we could include in our calculations:

• Airline/flights
• Public transport
• Rental cars
• Hotels
• Convention center

2. He discussed the benefits of using universal values for ghg emissions. For instance, for the ghg emissions for hotel night stays, instead of trying to figure out the difference between a five star hotel that is big enough that you can play tennis in and a one star hotel room, just use a universal number for all types of hotel rooms.

3. He explained how the scale of what action needs to be taken to offset one's emissions can be expressed in two ways, through a monetary value and through trees. He explained how using trees is beneficial as they are very tangible to people, they are something that can be easily seen and touched. Thus, utilizing trees to express this scale allows individuals to grasp the concept of offsetting much more effectively than expressing it as a monetary value.

Our team then pitched our project during the Tech Futures Challenge by MindFuel. Through participating in this challenge, we met the CEO of Mobility Quotient, Nikhil Sonpal, who provided us with significant mentorship on coding a software application, how to ensure an effective user experience, and how to develop a business model canvas for this project.

We are incredibly grateful for the mentorship that we received from both Joey O’Brien and Nikhil Sonpal for this project, as both of their expertise contributed highly to the progression of CO₂ EASY.

Below is a video pitch of CO₂ EASY presented at the Tech Futures Challenge of 2021, which highlights our value proposition and our hopes for the future when implementing this software.

Our Video Pitch

Minimum Viable Prototype

Our team has coded a prototype for our application CO₂ EASY, utilizing HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP. Below we have provided an explanation of our prototype, including information on how the application was coded.

Step By Step Guide

Our application is divided up into two main user experiences. When accessing our application online, the first page that users will be exposed to requires them to make a decision on how they would like to experience our application. These are the host and the attendee experiences.

Event Hosts

When clicking on the host mode, the user will be taken to a register and login page. Our register and login pages were created using MySql and the POST method. When the user types in their information, it is inputted into a MySql database where it can then be extracted for the login form.

If a user types in an email that has already been input into the database, they receive an error and will be asked to input another one. If the user's email is unique, then they will be able to successfully create an account and they will then be directed back to the original register and login form. They can then type in their email address and password into the login page, and if the information matches an input set in MySql, then the user can successfully log into the home page of the application.

In the home page of the application, the user can see an outline of the key features of the event host mode through buttons labeled:

1. Create An Event
2. My Events

Create An Event

Upon clicking the “Create An Event” button, the event host will be directed to a page with an event link generator. Upon clicking a button, they will generate a link that codes for a unique carbon calculator form that the attendees can access. For this prototype we have not yet been able to ensure that this link will code for a unique form, at the moment it only codes to the HTML page in which the calculator code is located. However, as we continue to develop our application, we hope to ensure that this link does code for a unique form.

Once the link has been generated, the event host can then email said link to their attendees so that they can all access the form.

My Events

If the user instead clicks the “My Events” button, they are taken to a page in which they will be able to see portals to different events they may host. The idea is that every time an event host creates a unique form through the “Create An Event” page one of these portals will link to the database attached to this unique form. Essentially, when attendees use the carbon calculator form and submit their final carbon footprint value, this value will show up in the specific database that they created so that the host can view it.

Hence, a new user will have empty databases when they first access this page while a user who has already hosted several events will have many databases full with total emission values.

Attendees

The second user experience is the attendee mode. When clicking on the attendee mode, the user will not be required to make an account as they would with the event host user experience. They are automatically directed to the home page of the application, which similarly to the event host home page, outlines the key features of the attendee mode through buttons labelled:

1. Carbon Calculator
2. Tree Planting Calculator
3. Offsetting Guide
4. Sustainable Facilities

Carbon Calculator

When clicking the “Carbon Calculator” button, the attendee is sent to a page with an input field. In this input field, the attendee must insert the event link that was previously generated and emailed to them by the host. Upon entering this link, the attendee is sent to our carbon calculator form.

For the purposes of this prototype, we decided to incorporate a first and last name input field within our carbon calculator. The reason we did this was because we were concerned about how the event host would be able to verify the identity of the individual who is using the calculator. For instance, someone may fill out the form multiple times, and the event host would have no way of knowing. Thus, to ensure the effectiveness of the calculator in producing a single result for each attendee, we believe that it is important for there to be a concrete form of identification. However, we also understand that PID is a significant concern for users, that inputting personal information into an unknown application is not preferable for many people. Hence, though we currently have first and last name input fields within this prototype, an actual marketed application would look a lot different. Our vision is to utilize an alternative form of identification. Since most events entail some sort of ID, whether it be a receipt number or code needed to get into the event, we thought that these could be utilized as identification. Though we were not able to integrate these for this prototype, we believe that this is a necessary change that we would need in order to ensure trust with our users.

The user will then fill out the rest of the required input fields, which include “Air Travel,” “Road Travel” and “Accommodation.” At the moment, the user must research the distances to where they are travelling to and input it in the calculator. In the future, we would like these input fields to be a drop down menu, in which an individual can pick the city that they are travelling to, and the application itself extracts the numeric values needed to carry out the calculation.

In JavaScript, a function was created in order to trigger a calculation to produce a final emissions value in kg of CO₂, showing the attendee the emissions they produced for attending this event.

Once this value is calculated, the user is then directed to three other features of our application. These are our tree planting calculator, our offsetting guide, and our list of sustainable facilities.

Our tree planting calculator contains an input field in which the user must input their total emissions value obtained from the carbon calculator in order to determine the number of trees needed to offset these emissions. This calculator was developed in the same way that the carbon calculator was developed, utilizing a function in JavaScript in order to produce a calculated value.

At the moment, our carbon calculator and tree planting calculator exist as separate entities within our prototype. However, moving forward, we would like to combine these two entities together into our carbon calculator, so that it produces both a total ghg value and a value for the number of trees needed to offset these emissions at once. This will enhance user experience, ensuring a decreased number of clicks and navigation for the same outcome.

After utilizing the carbon calculator, individuals will be directed to the offsetting guide, in which links are provided to each of the companies that we deemed eligible to be a part of this application. We wrote a quick summary for each of the offsetting companies provided in order to provide users with a sense of what the company is, to help guide them on choosing an offsetting method.

Finally, they will be directed to the sustainable facilities guide, which was coded in the exact same way that the offsetting guide was. These sustainable facilities include both hotels and restaurants.

The carbon calculator, tree planting calculator, offsetting guide, and sustainable facilities guide in addition each link to their own specific page that explains the criteria that was used to develop each section of our application. This was done in order to be transparent to our users and to also provide further education on what it means to be sustainable.

How we derived our Carbon Calculator

For our carbon calculator, we based our formula around different resources. We used carbonfootprint.com - Sustainable Flying to derive a value, by calculating the average of all of their listed g of CO₂ emissions per km of each type of plane. We then converted this value into kg, and multiplied it by 2 so that the value could represent a roundtrip.

Amount of CO₂ that is released per passenger on a flight:

We then fact-checked our calculator with the various existing carbon emissions calculators, attaining a similar amount when testing it with the same values.

For road travel, we used the ICCT publication CO₂ emissions from new passenger cars in Europe: Car manufacturers' performance in 2020 to derive a value of 108g of CO₂ produced per km for vehicles, and converted it into kg.

Amount of CO₂ that is released per passenger in a vehicle:

Finally, for accommodations, we used Ecometrica’s GHG Fact Sheet-Hotels to derive a value of 10 tonnes of CO₂ emissions released by staying at a hotel per year. The source stated that “emissions for hotels are typically between 5 and 15 tonnes of CO₂ per bedroom per year,” and we decided to use the mean value of this which is 10 tonnes. We converted this value into kg, and divided it by 365 days in order to find the emissions per night.

Amount of CO₂ that is released per hotel night stay:

How we derived our Tree Planting Calculator

For our tree planting calculator, we based our formula around values found on Tentree. Tentree’s website states that “46 trees will absorb 1 tonne of CO₂ per year.” Thus, to find the tonnes of CO₂ that 1 tree can absorb per year, we divided 1 tonne by 46 trees to attain a value of 0.022 tonnes/tree. We fact checked this amount on websites such as 10 Million Trees which states that “a mature tree absorbs carbon dioxide at a rate of 48 pounds per year” which is equal to about 0.022 tonnes. Since our carbon calculator derives a final CO₂ emissions value in kg, we then converted 0.022 tonnes to kg.

Amount of CO₂ that trees take in per year:

How we derived our Offsetting Guide

The criteria used to choose companies for our offsetting guide include the following:

1. Is the company transparent about where their energy comes from and how it is being utilized?
2. Is the company transitioning towards increased sustainable methods in energy and waste?
3. Is the company actively attempting to reduce their current emissions?
4. Does this company support environmental and offsetting initiatives?
5. Is this company sponsored by environmentally conscious groups or projects?
6. Does this company sponsor any non-governmental organizations?
7. Is this company actively attempting to create more environmentally conscious products?

How we derived our Sustainable Facilities

The criteria used to choose hotels and restaurants for our sustainable facilities list include the following:

1. Is this company attempting to reduce the emissions within their facilities?
2. Is this hotel or restaurant transparent about how their energy is being used and what it is being allocated towards?
3. Is this company attempting to persuade customers into turning towards more sustainable events?
4. Does this company actively support environmental and offsetting initiatives?
5. Is this company sponsored by environmentally conscious businesses?
6. Does this hotel or restaurant have a strong recycling program and a strong composting program?
7. Does this restaurant have a strong waste management and reduction program, and are they actively working to reduce the amount of waste produced?

Proof of Concept

We have registered for the Rotary District Conference on May 14, 2022 in order to test the workflow of our application at a smaller scale event. We will be calculating the offsets for the conference driving ourselves manually based on the information given and then presenting at this conference. We have allocated one tree per person or about 6$ for this transaction built into the registration cost.

At this event, we will manually collect information on how the attendees travelled to the event based upon three variables:

1. Type of vehicle
2. The return distance in (km)
3. Number of registrants in the vehicle

After we have collected all of their responses, we will then calculate the overall carbon footprint of all of these attendees—the total CO₂ emissions produced as a result of this event. In addition, we will present our offsetting guide to the attendees, providing education on what the process of offsetting is and what companies are out there that help individuals offset their carbon footprint in various ways.

As seen, the variables that are being focused on within this event do not strictly correlate to the ones within our prototype. The variables within our prototype represent a broad range of what needs to be analyzed during travelling to events, and the ones being analyzed during this conference are strictly within the branch of road travel. Thus, we will be doing more research in the future in order to come up with a formula that is specifically tailored to the variables being analyzed for the conference. We can then use these formulas developed for the conference and implement them into our actual application later on, in order to make our carbon calculator more specific and accurate.

Ultimately, we believe that this conference will provide us with valuable insight on the implementation of our concept, bridging a gap between ideation and a real-world application.