- Swedish scientist David Anderson created web-service 'Svalna' to track the environmental impact of your spending habits.
- Svalna uses your transaction data to analyse the 'energy-per-krona' for your shopping behaviour.
- The service aims to help you identify how and where you can decrease your environmental impact.
The site 'Svalna' wants to help you keep track of how much your shopping happiness costs the earth.
The web-service is developed by scientist David Anderson, who has done a research in sustainable consumption at the Chalmers University of Technology.
By creating an account at the site, you allow Svalna to connect to your bank account and extract transaction information from your bank. To provide a correct picture, you then need to fill out some information about your living situation, family and car ownership.
According to the founder, the site is the first of its kind since it analyses actual transactions. This provides a more accurate picture of how much your consumption actually affects the environment.
"We call the bluff," said David Anderson in an interview with NyTeknik. "I think that there is a huge risk that people forget how many jeans they bought last year."
This is why the use of transaction information provides a more truthful picture of your consumption habits than if you would answer a questionnaire alone.
Your transaction information is then processed through data on the energy consumption in different production steps within different industries. From Statistics Sweden doing so, the company provides a unit "energy-per-krona" for each sector and then applies it at the data you have shared with them.
So far, it provides a rather rough estimate. The founder points out that the more people that use the service, the better the estimates will get.
Currently, their main challenge is to make people feel comfortable sharing their transaction data. Until people feel comfortable with this type information sharing, the service comes in a less intimate alternative where you enter other information such as income and registration number on your car. This enables the service to extract other types of data through other channels.
The purpose of the web-service is to increase awareness of your consumption's environmental impact, and ultimately, help you understand how you could decrease your impact and which measures that will do so most effectively.
"We have realised that many want to know what plays a larger and smaller part in their environmental impact. Many are motivated and feel responsibility, but don't know where to start," explained David Anderson.
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