Welcome to the Cilo blog!
I’ve been working on a project for the past 6–12 months depending on how you count it, a project which stems from an idea that I’ve been mulling over since before I left Uni nearly two years ago. I’ve been thinking about documenting my progress for a while and as I’m just about to dive into the nitty-gritty of actually developing the product, I thought now would be as good a time as any to start telling telling the story of how I got here and where I hope to take the project.
Cilo is an app I’m developing to help people track the carbon footprint of the things they buy. Think of it as a kind of Monzo banking app but for greenhouse gas emissions. Where your banking app tells you the financial cost of the items you’ve bought, Cilo will tell you their “carbon cost”.
“That sounds grim”, I hear you murmur. “My banking app is depressing enough”. Fair enough, I hear you. However, as much of a downer as it may be to see your monthly spend zoom towards the limits of your budget AGAIN, you can’t deny that it does help motivate you to pick and choose what you really want to spend your money on. When it comes to climate change, I feel like we could all do with a little motivation.
So that’s one aim of the app, to help people set carbon budgets and stick to them. However, it’s not the only aim. See, the issue with a regular bank account is that it doesn’t really tell you the cost of things. It tells you the total cost of your shopping basket, but it doesn’t tell you the cost of the individual items in it.
This is generally fine for a bank account because we know how much we’re spending on things when we buy them. Every item in a shop has a price label somewhere nearby, and when we’ve made our purchase we’re handed a receipt which breaks down the cost of everything we bought for us.
However, this isn’t the case when trying to figure out our carbon spending. In fact, it’s really bloody hard to find any remotely digestible information on the carbon cost of things at all, beyond the extremely broad and very generic.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely good advice to try and minimise flying, cut down on meat and dairy, and lower the heating a bit if you’re trying to cut down on your emissions. But imagine if you were saving up for something. Maybe you want to get married, so you need to be a bit frugal for a year or two to save up for the wedding. Now imagine that all the information you had about how to save money was that flying, beef, and heating are all very, very bad… and that’s about it. When you went to the shop nothing had a price tag on it and when you bought something at checkout you had no idea what you’d just spent. It would be tough right? You’d probably have to think about trimming the invite list.
Well that’s kind of what we’re contending with right now when we try and reduce our climate impact as individuals. And that’s what frustrated me a couple of years ago when I first started researching this stuff. I came up with the idea of a carbon bank account just before I started my job as an engineer, something that would track a person’s spending and give people the knowledge of how they specifically could most easily and impactfully reduce their footprint.
The idea gestated in my mind for the first six months or so of my job and then March came and suddenly I found I had a lot more spare time in which to explore my ideas and start working on the project.
The thing is, terrifying existential threat aside, I actually really enjoyed that first lockdown, because I was loving prototyping and wireframing Cilo. I was so excited by the project, in fact, that in August I left my job to work on it full-time.
My plan originally was to look for someone who had experience developing software who could help me with that side of things, while I would handle the footprinting data and business side of things. If that fell through I would try and learn to code so that I could develop the app myself. However, after a while I realised I was kind of hoping it would fall through. The idea of coding really appealed to me. So I sacked off the search and got to work learning.
Since then my time has been roughly split between completing an online course in coding for iOS apps and gathering footprinting data on every single item sold on Sainsbury’s website. As I’m doing everything myself, I have had to limit the scope of the idea to its most stripped-down version (known as a minimum viable product or MVP).
The MVP I’m working on will (I’m pretty sure) only be for tracking the carbon footprint of your food and drink purchases for now. You just tell the app what you’ve bought, and it will do the rest. (To be clear none of your data will be shared or sold or used in any way other than to calculate your carbon footprint.) You can then track your carbon spending over time and see what changes you can make that will have the biggest impact in reducing your footprint for the least effort.
If that sounds like something that interests you, or if you want to keep up with my progress, check out my new hot-off-the-(word)press website and sign up to get first access to the app on its release.
I’m hoping to release the MVP early in the summer and I would like to then get to work on making it a much better tool. For that to be possible though, I’ll need to get people using the app from day 1, so your support would be hugely appreciated. And if you think any of your friends would be interested to learn how to reduce their carbon footprint, why not let them know about it?
Thanks for reading this longer-than-anticipated first blog post and I hope you can join me on my journey to making climate conscious living just a little bit easier for people! I genuinely can’t wait.
Laurence Collingwood,
Founder of Cilo
