Prototyping a Community-Generated, Mobile Device-Enabled Database of Environmental Impact Reviews of Consumer Products Bill Tomlinson University of California, Irvine wmt@uci.edu Abstract GreenScanner is a system that helps people engage in environmentally preferable purchasing during their everyday consumer transactions. This system has two parts: a dynamic online database of community-generated environmental impact reviews of products, and a mobile phone application that allows consumers to access these reviews at a point of purchase by photographing a product’s Universal Product Code (UPC). This paper describes a prototype of the system that was released publicly in April 2006, and analyzes the results of that deployment. Over its first year of existence, the site received approximately 31,000 hits. However, during that time, only 79 subjective comments were uploaded. This paper analyzes the site’s usage patterns, and describes a number of improvements to the system that are currently under way. 1. Introduction As the global population increases and the demands for natural resources approach or exceed their limits, a critical issue is the conservation of resources. A significant problem in U.S. society is the great deal of waste that is produced as a result of the production and consumption of consumer products. According to EPA’s Consumer Handbook for Reducing Solid Waste [4], the U.S. produces 179.4 million tons of trash per year, or more than 3.2 pounds per person per day. A sustainable environment mandates the reduction of consumer waste. Many consumers have at least some degree of environmental goodwill and the desire to engage in environmentally preferable purchasing [5] but do not have access to reliable information in this domain at the time of purchase. In the absence of this information, they may instead choose products based on price, labeling, imperfect memory, or force of habit. To help provide useful information to consumers at the point of purchase, various rating systems have been proposed, for example, relating to the healthiness of products (e.g., [16]). Product labels sometimes include statements regarding the environmental impact of products; however, these labels are not ubiquitous, they may be inconsistent, and often their relevance is not clear. Ultimately, consumers still may not know how environmentally sound different products are. Environmental considerations are clearly a priority for federal purchasing [5]; the goal of the GreenScanner project is to achieve similar ends with large numbers of consumers. Much of the waste produced in the U.S. comes from products that have UPCs 1 or similar identifying information on them. Of the solid waste mentioned above, 63 million tons come from the “glass,” “plastics,” “metals” and “other” categories, which frequently have UPCs [4], or 1.1 pounds of UPC coded waste per person per day. Corporations and stores use 1 The term UPC has been renamed UCC-12, and its functionality subsumed by the broader EAN/UCC-13 standard. For ease of understanding, all of these machine- readable tags are called “UPC codes” in this document. Figure 1: GreenScanner provides environmental impact reviews of consumer products via mobile phones. Proceedings of the 41st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2008 1530-1605/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE 1