By Linn Winge
A new clever Chrome extension uses machine learning to assist you when shopping on Amazon. It assesses the products by their eco-friendly aspects. This helps customers make more sustainable choices without putting an enormous amount of time into research.
The browser extension is called Finch and its assessment can be used on Amazonâs top 41 product categories. The program ranks and evaluates thousands of different products. Finch founder Lizzie Horvitz is a climate activist who started fielding sustainability questions from friends while working on the sustainability team at Unilever, the consumer goods giant.
âI realized that content online was very difficult to sift through. On the one hand, you have these wonky academic papers which werenât really meant for normal people to be reading. And then on the other side, you have these very well-intentioned bloggers who often are talking not in terms of data or factsâtheyâre saying things like, this is âeco-friendly,â or âall natural,â and thatâs not really based in any type of science.â She says to Fast Company:
For each category of products on Amazon, the team behind Finch do elaborate research about the challenges that type of product faces. They then rate 10 or 20 products from that category with points varying from 1 to 10. Finally they feed the information into a machine learning tool that thoroughly learns product details from Amazon for all the other products in that category and then rates them.
âSupply chains are incredibly tricky. Theyâre not as transparent as they need to be. Part of whatâs helping is weâre not reinventing the wheel here: Weâre using a lot of datasets that are already existing . . . which are right now mostly geared towards companies and brands, and not to the end consumer. Weâre really just aggregating all the information thatâs already out there and putting it in one centralized place,â Horvitz says.
Horovitz explains that nothing scores a perfect 10 but anything with a score above 6.5 has the smallest environmental impact in its category.
âIf itâs physical and out there, itâs probably having some sort of negative impact on the environment. So whatâs important to us is to show where it falls, given the relationship to the other products out there,â she says
Finches goal is to rank all the categories on Amazon and then move on to other large ecommerce websites - and eventually âany ecommerce site out thereâ.
Presently, thereâs a waiting list to get the browser extension which isnât featured on any digital extension marketplaces. If youâd like to join the waitlist you can do it on their website.
Picture: Finch via Fast Company