Onboard, share location, choose an offsetting project, and we’ll help you go from ‘climate worrier to climate warrior’. Capture automatically tracks emissions from mobility choices (via GPS-based algorithm) & food choices. We hope you enjoy the early version!
I’m sure I do a tonne of things throughout the day that all have an effect on the environment. Transport is the obvious one, but I was a bit surprised to see food there as well. How come you went with that and not something like home energy instead?
Thanks so much for the question @jimdabell
When it comes to the average emissions attributed to our daily actions, the % split between emissions from food, transport, home energy usage and more broadly goods & services (tech, clothing etc.) can vary a fair bit.
We got started with tracking mobility (before the covid lockdown - slightly bad timing!), as this can be the most significant element of an individual's carbon footprint. We then added food as it was fairly quick & simple to do so... but home energy usage is coming next - although it's not going to be easy.
We're currently investigating how we can help users integrate their energy consumption, ideally in an automated way. The smart meter infrastructure doesn't support this across the board, so it's not as straightforward. But we're committed to finding a solution to this 🤞
@jimdabell@xeeez also, food is much easier to have control over Vs home energy. The simple choice of Beef Vs Chicken Vs Eggplant would have very implications.
That said...
I found out today that "carbon footprint" was a concept injected into the public sphere by BP especially, to shift the blame from the producers to the consumers. Bit about it here: https://mashable.com/feature/car...
@jimdabell@xeeez@samrye_enspiral
Thanks very much for raising this Sam and it's an uncomfortable fact that we've grappled really hard with.
Here's how we see it... yes, creating this term was a genius way for BP to push blame at consumers and it's served the fossil fuel industry well over the past few decades 💵
However... our mission is to help people live a planet-friendly life (with much more than carbon footprint tracking in the future) - buy we started-off by creating this tracker to help people become more aware of emissions linked to our everyday lives, in the belief that it will *nudge users to identify more as 'somebody who cares about the environment' *helping to subtly affect a chain of other more systemic behaviours over time, such as switching their energy to a renewable tariff, voting for a planet-friendly politician, or buying an electric vehicle 🌏
There are similarities here to how a simple 'no plastic straw' movement has evolved into industrial action to reduce single use plastics around the world.
@jimdabell@xeeez@josie_stoker oh I didn't mean it so much as criticism.
I think the potential for collectivising the actions and feedback loops are really exciting when people are all using a platform together for individual goals. The potential to grow the movement by Strava-like challenges, groups, and visualisation is exciting.
Keep fighting the good fight.
One of the most exciting features of Capture is the automatic prediction of emissions from daily transport choices... one of the questions we get asked a lot is how the transport prediction methodology actually works.
Capture app offers an automatic mobility tracking mode as well as a manual tracking mode. In the automatic mode, the app looks at the user's movement patterns, speed, as well user's proximity to transits and needs access to location to function in the background. The prediction is not 100% accurate but lets the users easily modify a journey, choose different levels of accuracy and specify default transport mode under settings.
We've tried to make the algorithm as efficient as possible in terms of battery usage. The location function is mostly kept inactive and we only start looking at the location data when we receive a significant signal of movement. There are intricate differences as to how we handle this across iOS and Android, but preserving the battery has always been of utmost importance to us. Our tests have shown that Capture uses very little battery compared to most common apps on a typical phone.
Hello Product Hunt! Thank you so much @kevin for Hunting us. Thrilled to be here today and looking forward to taking any questions the community may have. Suggestions for features are also very welcome. Capture's CoFounder & CTO Aziz (@xeeez) will be with here too, so please shoot us whatever you have!
Luke Bryan
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