Find Green

The world is facing extraordinary environmental challenges, much of which are driven by our linear “take-make-waste” economy. Consumer demand for sustainable services and products, such as renewable energy and organic produce, is increasing. However, consumers do not have a way to easily find, patronize and promote green businesses. Consequently, consumers feel unempowered and businesses remain unaware amid this growing market demand for sustainable practices.

To tackle this problem, we’ve created the Find Green consumer choice platform, which is a mobile app available for iOS and Android phones. Similar to a “Green Yelp”, the app allows users to easily find, compare and rate the sustainability of businesses. 

Our long-term goal is to mainstream sustainability into customers’ decision-making on major online platforms, such as Yelp, Google Maps, Airbnb, Amazon, Angie’s List and Booking.com. Consequently, Find Green has the potential to shift millions of purchasing decisions everyday towards sustainable products and services.

Over 8 million tonnes of plastic enter the ocean each year. Temperatures are projected to increase 2F to 9.7F by 2100. Biodiversity loss is escalating with 50% of coral reefs already dead. These extraordinary global environmental challenges are rooted in our linear, take-make-waste economy. 

If we’re to transform to a circular economy, businesses in all sectors from food to transportation to accommodation must shift toward sustainable practices.  Doing so requires businesses recognizing pent-up consumer demand, which is currently hidden as consumers do not have a way to convey their preferences for sustainable practices.   

Technological innovation offer an opportunity to demonstrate market demand through platforms such as TripAdvisor and Bookings.com, where hundreds of millions of choices are made by consumers every day. Amazon alone receives more than 197 million visitors worldwide each month. 

Currently these platforms offer information on pricing, distance and overall quality, but fail to convey the sustainability of the products and services.  There is a massive untapped opportunity to incorporate green ratings into the business profiles. Doing so would help drive consumer choices toward sustainable products and services, thereby demonstrating market demand and motivating businesses to shift toward sustainable practices. 

Find Green will meaningfully improve the lives of several segments of society. First, we will address the growing number of consumers interested in, but have no effective means of patronizing, sustainable businesses. Equally important will be our promotion of eco-friendly businesses. However, most critical will be influencing businesses and consumers who are not sustainable. By providing a simple rating system, we will raise awareness of sustainable practices they could adopt and incentivize them to do so by demonstrating market demand. Finally, we will partner with municipalities, universities and other organizations that wish to advance circular economy policies. 

We are testing Find Green in Washington, DC, where we have discussed the app with users and businesses through informal discussions, focus groups, one-on-one interviews and electronic surveys. They have provided critical insight, including suggestions of incentives to retain users and ways to influence businesses. We’re sharing our survey data with the Department of Environment and Energy to help them enforce the new plastic straw ban, and with George Washington University in efforts to reduce single-use plastics among surrounding restaurants. Their feedback has also been instrumental in understanding how to tailor Find Green to the needs of organizations that might use the data. 

Our vision at Find Green is to bend consumption curves towards a circular economy by influencing retail businesses to adopt environmentally sustainable practices. Our goal is to mainstream (or “greenstream”) sustainability into customer decision-making in real time. Doing so allows individuals to easily identify, find and patronize businesses that are clearly making an effort to lower their environmental impact. This would improve the visibility of these businesses and demonstrate to businesses in the same sector that there is market demand for environmentally responsible practices.

We have created, and are currently testing, the Find Green consumer choice platform. Available in iPhone and Android App Stores (search “Find Green”), Find Green is a smartphone application that allows users to easily find, compare and rate the environmental sustainability of businesses on a spatial interface. The Find Green app is modeled after - and is intended to improve and complement - popular, user-interface based rating systems for restaurants and other businesses like Yelp, Google Maps and TripAdvisor. 

The unique solution Find Green has developed is a crowd-sourced platform for rating the sustainability of businesses through objective, easily observable environmental practices (e.g. Does the business provide plastic straws? What portion of the food is vegetarian?). The short, easy-to-use questionnaire guides the user and drives the rating, which is aggregated and reflected in the profile of each business in the form of one to five green leaves.

This platform allows potentially millions of users to easily add environmental sustainability into their purchasing decision-making, dramatically improving outcomes for reducing single-use plastics, greenhouse gas emissions, and other positive changes in business practices with impacts throughout the supply chain. Find Green is currently being tested in Washington, DC, on coffee shops and cafes and will expand to other sectors (e.g. hotels, grocery stores) and will scale globally. (see more detail here: 

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1gU_DFSv8ZvizbNzZdUulr9f-ax4vvxx6SZRvSz_NX2Q/edit?usp=sharing )

Consumer choice platforms, such as Yelp and Google Maps, convey overall quality, pricing, location and distance information effectively. However, they convey little information concerning the environmental sustainability of these businesses. The unique solution Find Green has developed is a crowd-sourced rating system for comparing the sustainability of businesses through easily observable environmental practices. For the first time, environmental considerations can systematically become a factor in the decision making of millions of individuals who wish to ensure that their overall environmental impact is minimized. 

Through market research we have identified a few apps with a similar focus - including  Fosh, TreeDay, and Greenease. However, these apps fall short in several key aspects. Greenease provides “green” reviews of food-related aspects of restaurants (e.g. locally sourced and vegetarian), yet does not provide overall sustainability ratings. TreeDay’s sustainability ratings are not based on user views, thereby failing to demonstrate market demand and are much more labor-intensive to maintain at scale. Greenease and TreeDay only show sustainable businesses on their interface leaving little incentive for non-complying businesses to gradually improve, and customers cannot see how other businesses compare. While Fosh is the most similar to Find Green in providing an overall rating based on crowd-sourcing, the survey questions lack precision and the interface is difficult to navigate.  Further, none of these apps provides a rating that can easily be incorporated into existing platforms (i.e. green leaves into Yelp business profiles) with the potential to reach millions of users.  

We have created an app that is a consumer choice spatial platform for both Android and iOS devices. It is similar to Yelp, Google Maps and TripAdvisor in that basic information is provided regarding the businesses (e.g. pricing, location, website) and it depends on crowd-sourced data for ratings of businesses by users. However, our app is focused on conveying the sustainability of the businesses. In short, we are creating a “green lens on the internet”. Our data also depends on users completing an objective survey related to easily observable environmental practices, rather than giving their subjective opinion.

The Google Maps API is used to load businesses on the interface, and a customized (Ruby on Rails) Admin panel manages businesses that appear on the Find Green map. For development we are contracting HDWebsoft.

Unsustainable production and consumption patterns are a core driver of worldwide environmental degradation. Reversing these patterns necessitates businesses to shift toward sustainable practices, which requires demonstrating market demand (Burton 2019). Market demand is not evident because consumers lack sufficient information on business sustainability. Fortunately, consumer choice platforms provide a mechanism to reach millions of consumers who highly value crowd-sourced reviews [BrightLocal, 2018].  

To address this need, Find Green is influencing businesses and consumers by creating a platform that enables consumers to find and rate businesses based on the sustainability of their practices.  Our theory of change is based on two sets of activities, outputs, and outcomes.

In the first set of activities, consumers rate businesses based on the sustainability of their practices. These ratings are shared with the businesses. The output, therefore, is the Find Green app with reliable sustainability ratings of businesses’ practices driven by consumers. The short-term outcome is businesses are aware of the Find Green ratings. The medium-term outcome is businesses realize there is consumer demand for sustainable practices. The long-term outcome is businesses consequently shift to sustainable practices.

The second set of activities are consumers use the Find Green app to find sustainable businesses. The output, therefore, is high usage of the Find Green app, which shows market demand. The short-term outcome is consumers have the information they need to compare businesses. The medium-term outcome is consumers select businesses that are more sustainable. The long-term outcome is consumers make sustainable choices.

We recently published Find Green on the App Store and Google Play and currently have more than 220 users of the Find Green app without the benefit of any marketing. We expect to have 5,000 users by the end of 2020 once we launch the app through partners and social media marketing. Over the next five years, we’ll expand to other cities worldwide and ultimately reach millions of users.

We currently have surveyed more than 300 of the 1,000 coffee shops and cafes in our pilot city of Washington, DC. We expect to have reviewed all 1,000 businesses by the end of 2020. Over the next five years, we’ll expand to other business sectors (i.e. restaurants, hotels, dry cleaners, etc) worldwide, reaching millions of businesses.

During the next year we will continue to test Find Green in Washington, DC, focusing on cafes and coffee shops with the goals of shifting businesses toward sustainable practices and empowering consumers. Over the next five years we will reach millions of people by expanding to cities throughout North America, Europe and then Asia, Africa and Latin America. We will also expand the business sectors in Find Green to include restaurants, grocery stores, dry cleaners, clothing stores and other retail businesses. 

Parallel to growing the Find Green app, we also plan to mainstream the green leaf ratings into existing platforms that are already reaching tens of millions of people, such as Yelp, Google Maps and Trip Advisor. This idea is similar to how Rotten Tomato movie ratings feed into Fandango, Flixster and other consumer choice platforms. The green leaf ratings would appear alongside the overall star ratings, pricing, distance to destination and other basic information. In this way, we will empower tens of millions of consumers to find, compare and choose sustainable businesses.  Ultimately we will expand into other platforms, such as AirBnB, Angies List and Bookings.com, with surveys tailored to these platforms further increasing the reach of the Find Green impact to potentially a billion people.

Our biggest barriers are the need for:

Marketing -  Promoting the app in order to attract users is critical to our success, particularly because we need them to not only use the app to find and patronize green businesses, but also to conduct the survey to create the ratings. We also need to retain these users, which we have determined from interviews requires: monetary incentives (e.g.discounts); confirmation that the results are creating change among the businesses; the ability to notify friends that the user conducted a survey; a user-specific avatar that evolves to various levels; and/or access to news and resources.   

Business acumen - While we have identified several potential revenue streams, it remains uncertain if these are viable. We lack financial expertise within the core team to evaluate the financial viability of this initiative beyond the initial revenue streams we have identified. 

Financial support - While the majority of the effort going into Find Green is volunteer-based, there are a few aspects, including the app design and development that require contracts. Financial support is therefore critical in order to continually improve the app and design, along with improving how we market and communicate the app..

To market Find Green, we will work with local (e.g. EcoWomen, Green Drinks and Ocean Divas) and national partners (e.g. Sierra Club, Surfrider Foundation, Conservation X Labs, The Ocean Foundation)  with large member networks to promote the app through their social media channels. These organizations have confirmed they will promote Find Green. We are also working on the previously noted measures to retain active users, including most immediately establishing relationships with businesses interested in providing discounts.  We are also sharing our data regarding which businesses are providing plastic straws with the DC Government, which is enforcing the ban on plastic straws. We are also providing our data to George Washington University, which is influencing their surrounding businesses to shift toward more sustainable practices.

To attain business acumen, we have partnered with Duke University Fuqua Business School through which a MBA student conducted a preliminary assessment of expected revenue streams from advertising. However, a much more thorough analysis needs to be conducted. Such an analysis requires a financial analyst to examine the options against the experience of other consumer choice platforms and apps to determine what’s viable. We are, therefore, seeking a business expert to join our team or seeding funding to cover the cost of hiring someone.

Finally, to address our need for financial support, particularly to contract with the app developer, we have successfully applied for, and received, grants totaling over $60,000. We continue to pursue grant funding in the near term to address these needs.

Find Green is fiscally sponsored by Conservation X Labs (CXL), which is a technology and innovation nonprofit organization that works in the field of conservation. They spur innovative solutions to stop the extinction crisis.

CXL provides the legal and financial basis for FG to receive funding and receives a 9% fee for this service. They also provide mentoring and advice through the staff and through their Marketplace, which serves as a match maker for experts in conservation, technology, business and marketing. They also have provided over $8,000 in support to Find Green through the competitive awards program.

Find Green is led by a passionate core team of three volunteer senior sustainability and communication experts, benefits from the advice of a panel of world-class scientific experts, draws inspiration from business, marketing and psychology advisors and gains insight and support from a suite of dedicated interns. The FInd Green team also includes contractors working on the app and website development. The resulting wealth of diverse skills and experience has led to the creation of the app, recruitment of over 200 users and solicitation of over $60,000. 

The Find Green team is uniquely positioned to deliver our solution because of the deep experience and expertise of the co-founders as well as the impressive network of mentors, advisors and interns we have recruited (and will continue to recruit) through our broad networks. The project lead, Dr. Leah Karrer, has worked in conservation for over 25 years creating and directing global conservation programs, including at Conservation International, NOAA and now the Global Environment Facility. Marie-Therese Maurice is experienced in individual empowerment and global communication having created the One Minute for Earth campaign. Currently with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Tom Hammond has over 30 years experience directing international initiatives in sustainable development in over 20 countries. 

Our sustainability advisors are world renowned, including:  Dr. Thomas Lovejoy (the godfather of biodiversity, George Mason University); Dr. Nancy Knowlton (international expert in marine conservation, Smithsonian Institution); Dr. Jenna Jambeck (international expert on plastic pollution, University of Georgia); and, Dr. Ralph Sims (international expert on climate change, Massey University).  With regard to business and marketing, we are advised by Dr Mather Carscallen and Alexandra Orozco - both with strong backgrounds in start-up enterprises. Dr. Ben Kadel is advising on institutional design while we receive legal advice from Domenico Demarinis, an expert in intellectual property law. We have also benefited from six interns who have analyzed potential revenue streams, conducted customer validation, researched the basis of the survey questions and recruited users.

Find Green currently has two groups of partners to promote the app and use the results to shift businesses toward sustainable practices:

• Plastic Pollution Coalition, Sierra Club DC, Conservation X Labs, The Ocean Foundation, Ocean Divas, Our Last Straw, US Green Building Council DC Area, Eat or Toss, and Ecosia are promoting the Find Green app through their extensive networks of members through social media and events, which is critical to increase our user base; and,

• George Washington University freshman 2018 and 2019 classes have and will test the app and the Office of Sustainability will be using the survey results to work with surrounding eateries to shift toward sustainable practices.  We have also shared our data with the DC Government Department of Environment and Energy and the business alliance Our Last Straw to help them raise awareness and enforce the recently passed ban on plastic straws. 

Our core business model focuses on individuals seeking green-practicing businesses and who want to help promote those businesses, along with retail business owners who have an interest in improving their environmental practices.

Perhaps the biggest benefactors of this approach are businesses who are not currently sustainable. By seeing their own rating and witnessing consumer interest in the app, they will be inspired to adopt more eco-friendly practices. Through the survey results, they will be able to identify strategies they should adopt (e.g. recycling, vegetarian options).  

As Find Green grows, the business model will expand to include businesses and services that are not on the app. Find Green will provide a platform to advertise to their target audience. Solar panel, electric car and other eco-friendly businesses will be able to easily reach their target audiences of environmentally oriented consumers.

Existing consumer-choice platforms focused on retail, such as Yelp, Google Maps and Trip Advisor, are also benefectors in that they will be able to incorporate green ratings into their platforms under the business profiles. Other platforms, such as AngiesList and Craigslist, both of which are more service oriented, will also benefit as we create tailored surveys for their services. 

Finally, municipalities, universities and other organizations that wish to advance circular economy policies will benefit from being able to identify environmental issues among businesses (e.g. no one is recycling) and discern which businesses are likely to be champions or opponents to new measures to encourage sustainable practices.

We are currently dependent on philanthropic and in-kind support. Over the next 2 years we anticipate continuing to need philanthropic support from foundation grants complemented by crowd sourced fundraising through Kickstarter and/or Patreon. We are also pursuing angel investors for seed funding and applying to seed funding pitch sessions.

For the future sustainability of Find Green, we have identified four potential revenue streams:

Advertising - high visibility promotions for eco-friendly businesses interested in marketing their products or services to  our unique eco-friendly user base. 

Licensing the ratings  - incorporation of the Find Green ratings into existing platforms, such as Yelp or TripAdvisor, to feed into their business profiles, helping them to attract eco-friendly customers. We are also planning to expand into tailored surveys for AirBnB, Hotels.com and other consumer-choice platforms.

Licensing the survey data - cities, universities or other organizations seeking 'green data' pay to access our data. These organizations might also pay for consulting services to tailor the survey to their needs.

Membership - special amenities for users and businesses, such as tailored analytics on user surveys, insights into resources for greening their businesses and updates on the latest environmental news related to their business sector.

Commission on transactions - fees tied to purchases made via the app to member businesses, such as reservations or delivery.

There are several barriers which MIT Solve can help us address.

One of the biggest barriers is getting the results of the surveys to the businesses in order to motivate them to shift toward sustainable practices. We are starting with coffee shops and cafes. The businesses that are part of Solve, such as Starbucks, can provide great insight into what types of information would be most useful for them.

The second barrier is retaining users, who have indicated they are motivated by monetary rewards. Again the businesses that are part of Solve can help determine the viability of monetary rewards  (e.g. 10% off Starbucks if you have conducted 10 surveys) and how to pursue this idea with businesses. 

The third barrier is technological. We need to improve several aspects of the Find Green app,  such as ensuring data quality given the survey is open to the public. We have considered triangulation and training of “super users” to validate survey results. Solve partners, such as Google, would be extremely valuable in advising on this aspect. Google Maps, for example, is a similar consumer choice platform and it would be very useful to understand how they quality control their data.

Finally, our fourth barrier is determining the financial viability of our idea. The business model mentoring provided by Solve would help tremendously in assessing options, particularly if we could receive mentoring from a business expert familiar with consumer choice platforms. 

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The main types of organizations that would be useful as partners are retail businesses and consumer choice platforms. Partnering with Starbucks and other major retailers would provide insight into how to motivate shifts in their businesses toward sustainable practices. We could learn the barriers to shifting practices and consider how Find Green could help overcome these barriers. For example, interviews with business managers of DC based cafes indicate that lack of consumer requests for sustainable practices and lack of information on available resources are two key barriers. The consumer-driven ratings will demonstrate consumer demand for sustainable practices and we will provide resources to the surveyed businesses, such as information on alternatives to plastic straws. 

We are interested in partnering with major crowd-sourcing platforms, such as Google, in order to reach tens of millions of consumers. We propose to feed the Find Green ratings into the business profiles so that Google Map users, for example, can consider sustainability in their selection of businesses to patronize just as they do overall quality, pricing and distance. The major crowd-sourcing platforms attract million of users and according to business managers, are the only ones they visit regularly. Consequently, feeding our ratings into the profiles is an important means of alerting businesses to their level of sustainability and the need to adopt more sustainable practices.

Partnerships with financial institutions would be extremely useful as we are seeking advice on potential revenue streams. 

The AI Innovations Prize will help us incorporate artificial intelligence into Find Green in four critical ways.  Most importantly, we plan to use AI to improve the quality of our survey data, which drive the ratings. We will use image recognition software to validate survey responses (e.g. photos of recycling bins would confirm the recycling question). We will also search comments in other consumer choice platforms (e.g. a customer noting in Yelp the lack of vegetarian options would validate the vegetarian question).

Second, we will use AI to provide targeted information to our users based on their preferences. We will target news and resources to them, which is part of building a community of users as an incentive to joining Find Green (e.g. users who consistently comment on vegetarian options would be sent news of an upcoming vegetarian festival). We will also employ the user preferences for targeted advertising, a priority source of funding Find Green.

Third, we will use AI to examine patterns among business sustainability practices. We need to understand the basis on which businesses are adopting sustainable practices since our core mission is to shift businesses toward sustainable practices. 

Finally, we will use AI to provide targeted solutions to businesses based on their surveyed practices (e.g. for businesses providing plastic straws, we would send information on paper and metal alternatives). Business managers have indicated their barrier to shifting practices is information on how to do so.

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The Innospark Ventures Prize funding will be used to ensure data quality controls. We have identified a few data quality measures we would pursue with the funding: 1) training users before they are able to conduct surveys; 2) using AI to identify inconsistencies in survey results and then following-up  to identify the cause; and 3) requiring a certain number of consistent surveys before posting a rating.

The Find Green data is crowd sourced from users who survey businesses using the 10 point questionnaire. The results from the surveys drive the green leaf ratings from 1 to 5 green leaves. We will use the data to alert the surveyed businesses as to which practices their customers have identified they are conducting are and are not sustainable.  The intent is to encourage these businesses to continue the sustainable practices and to change their unsustainable practices to be sustainable.