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Capture — The Fitbit for your carbon footprint 🌍
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!
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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.
Very cool! Love the auto-offset feature! Just subscribed. Can't wait to tell my friends about it and looking forward to more updates! It would be awesome if it integrated with a meal tracking service like MyFitnessPal, but as someone who has worked in the space, I definitely understand the complexities behind turning that data into carbon emissions data.
@nicbyron Great idea regarding integration with MyFitnessPal and other popular meal tracking services. As you pointed out we'll need to overcome a few challenges there, which we'll try to do our best on in the coming months.
Would love to hear your feedback and any other feature ideas after you use the app for a few days 🙂
@nicbyron Thanks so much, both features would be very useful indeed.
For the food tracker, we decided to keep it really broad at this stage. The app adds a default food entry for each day based on the user's baseline questionnaire choice and estimate daily food emissions based on that. It's very easy to edit it on a day to day basis if you slightly divert from your average meat intake (can choose Vegan, Vegetarian, Pescatarian, Low meat, Medium or High meat for a specific day). Would you like to be able to add more details to that single daily entry or the ability to add multiple meals a day?
@xeeez I don't mind the logic you have in place of a default profile that you can then tweak on a day by day profile, but it would be nice to have a bit more granularity as far as the different food groups go. For instance, I could choose the options you have right now "vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian..." if I wanted or I could go into more detail and provide a value of "none", "a little", "a fair amount", "a lot" for the different categories that have the largest impact (e.g. "red meat", "poultry", "dairy products", "fish").
Another (larger) feature request: being able to input and offset online purchases. I have plugin a "Neutral" which tells me the carbon emissions from my purchase and it would be great to input this data or possibly have it calculated on your end by inputting the origin and weight of the package (for those that don't have a plugin such as Neutral), and then have that added to my daily total and made up for in my monthly auto-offset.
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.
We are all unaware of the environmental effects of our actions. Hopefully this will keep us informed and more aware. Congratulations makers
Great app! I've seen a few carbon-tracking products popping-up recently, was wondering how Capture is different?
Also, how does Capture make money 🤑?
Thanks for your question David! Yes indeed - there's been increasing momentum in this area lately, which is great to see 😁 A few points that help Capture stand-out:
1. Automatic tracking of mobility emissions via GPS-based algorithm
2. Simple monthly goal concept, making the 1.5 degree Paris Agreement 7.6% reduction target easy-to-achieve on a personal level
3. The option to 'offset-as-you-go' through a carefully selected handful of verified carbon offsetting projects
In the future, we will be adding a function for corporate teams and communities to set-up their own areas - that's a couple months down the road!
We make money through a 10% service fee on carbon offset subscriptions, but in time, we predict to have the majority of our revenue from corporate clients, using a product-led-growth model 💪
Hi everyone! Just a note here linking the app for those interested 🤳🏽
🤖 Android: https://play.google.com/store/ap...
🍏 iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ca...
@xeeez and I will be online to take any questions or feedback 🤓 Thank you!
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!
I really like the whole idea of finally giving something back to nature. It is our responsibility and with this app I think the ?makers have really done a great job at taking the first step which is to inform their users our their carbon footprint. I have been using it for the past 3 months and it has helped me understand my impact.
Another great thing is just the seamless ability to offset my emissions right in the app itself.
Sharing a little about how Capture got started for those curious...
Around a year ago, Aziz & I began looking at the disconnect between people caring about the climate crisis, but not really taking action, after meeting via an incubator in Singapore 🇸🇬
We saw a few key issues - climate change is a giant, terrible, yet relatively slow-evolving problem (years/decades, not days/weeks), it it difficult to know what to do and to know what impact you have made, talking about our carbon footprint’ generally makes us feel guilty, not satisfied - so it’s usually a one-off event 😥
We set-out to create a tool that would help people feel empowered, encouraged and satisfied, hence our mission ‘making planet-friendly living possible, for everyone’ 🌏
Certainly still a long long way off this goal - but we released the initial version of the Capture app in January, and have updated nearly on a bi-weekly basis since then! Lots planned for the future but really excited to share where we are now with the PH community 🚀
Love it! 💚 Actually for someone like me who would like to be more conscious but don’t really want to make tons of extra effort, Capture is perfect, really user-friendly too 😊
Cool product guys! Have been using it for the past few months for tracking and it really helps in opting for smart, eco-friendly choices. The idea and the execution both seem remarkable.
The app is way more user friendly than any other carbon footprint app I've seen. Great job ?makers
@markus_b Thanks Markus! We wanted to give users a few choices on *how* to offset emissions within the app, including the option to 'offset-as-you-go', where we help you offset only what you have emitted each month ✌🏼
Luke Bryan