With climate change and various environmental factors threatening our way of life and those of our children, there’s been a huge increase in recent years of people striving to live a green, clean life that minimises any adverse impact they have on the world. There are many different ways people are able to change their lifestyles. Limiting energy consumption and recycling and two easy and quantifiable ways to help the environment, but the tricky aspect of lowering one’s carbon footprint has been a much more difficult beast to tackle in any measurable terms, until now.
Ecoingot, a group of environmental tech experts, are busy creating a platform which helps eco-conscious individuals gather and assess their carbon impact data across everything from their everyday purchases to activities and lifestyle choices. And they’re doing it on the blockchain.
Their solution, titled the Internet of Carbon, is said to use cutting-edge technological methods to gather the data and process it in a way that makes it easy to access by everyone with the aid of an app. This is all made transparent and secure by building the platform on the blockchain, so every piece of data is accounted for and can be tracked. It aims to provide carbon usage data on everything from a cup of coffee to taxi rides, to Amazon deliveries or doing your laundry.
Ecoingot’s platform could not be coming at a better or more urgent time, since the IPCC have reported that a global temperature rise of 1.5 degrees will have truly catastrophic consequences for mankind, that monumental changes are needed in the world to ensure this doesn’t happen, and that time is drastically running out before it’s too late to implement these changes. The world needs everyone to club together and help make the changes needed.
And currently, it is not happening fast enough, especially when it comes to industry level changes, which take years to implement due to the arduous processes they need to go through, and the many people deliberately trying to put roadblocks in the way so they can hang onto their profits at all costs. This is why Ecoingot is doing its best to put pressure on big-wig industries and retailers. But as they know they have a long battle ahead of them, they’re currently focussing their attention on those they can rely on to help: the public.
Ecoingot uses three main approaches in its mission to reduce carbon footprints: education, reduction and offsetting. Not only will their app tell its user about the different carbon impacts their choices have on the environment, it will give them an easy opportunity to redress any carbon-heavy lifestyle choices by providing alternatives.
The team are currently developing a data engine, ECOSISTM, using a carbon impact calculation model created by climate change expert Professor Mike Berner-Lees and his team. As no such data is currently available for consumers to assess what their personal carbon footprints is, this looks to be the first of its kind. With a variety of big data already available about large parts of our lives, such as fitness trackers and sleep monitors, having access to data that can potentially save the world should be at the top of the list of things we require.
Their EGT token is launching at the Malta Blockchain Summit, while their app is due to launch in April 2019, coinciding with Earth Day, which focuses attention on environmental factors threatening the planet. If it’s a success, there’s a chance it could make a real difference to one of the biggest issues facing humankind.