Why are you participating for Based India?

We've had a 'red pill' moment with India's excess consumerism trends seeing the amount of wastage in food and other retail by an average urban Indian. By 2030 half of India's population will be living in cities which means with more disposable income, this problem will only worsen with time. Now more than ever, there is a need for businesses to leverage open data protocols, bring their data and insights together and solve for the climate crisis. This is a hard problem to solve and consumer behaviour needs change. Base offers us the perfect opportunity to productise a scalable, high-volume transaction solution and offers us an explosive, high-agency community of builders and supporters in building a disruptive business for the modern world

What challenges are you focusing on?

We are focussed on 3 major challenges.

The first challenge - Sustainability initiatives today are fragmented because supply chains are fragmented. 86% of all company emissions are Scope 3 (air water and land emissions that are emitted upstream suppliers and downstream, outside the direct control of a large business). Vendor environment data creation and sharing is a challenge and finding truly green raw materials and green vendors is guesswork.

The second challenge - greenwashing has eroded a consumer's trust in sustainability claims. According to a retail report by IBM published in 2020, 79% of Indian consumers predicate their buying decisions based on sustainability. And, 75% of Consumers do not trust the accuracy on food labels (certification standards, conformity in the supply chain, etc.).

The third - Climate policies are catching up with Climate change and the market is not ready for it. New green regulations trends are at an all-time high. And policies such as the EU Deforestation Regulation and EU CBAM will demand environmental and traceable disclosures on all exports which Indian businesses are at all equipped to support. According to the Centre for Science and Environment, it is estimated that this can potentially dent India's GDP by 0.05% due to non-compliance.

Lastly, voluntary carbon credit markets today are ridden with dodgy environmental science, and double counting where carbon offsets help both customers and are sold off as carbon credits. Even then there are no ways yet to verify whether or not the offsets may have been sold to multiple stakeholders. This is a 'hidden' greenwashing market, waiting to be called out in the next few years which overall - just will not make enough of a dent toward climate change.

How does your submission address this challenge?

This project operates between 3 explosive markets - web3, climate action and consumerism. Disruption at the centre of these 3 markets, requires investor, business and consumer buy-ins. Our submission is meant to prove that this solution is technologically feasible and that it is the right use case for decentralized platforms such as Base that offer high-throughput and low transaction fees.

This product has the potential to incentive buyers, sellers, consumers and recyclers towards circularity.

1. It enables consumers to combat greenwashing claims with product traceability. It can also equip them to handle product end-of-life via access to recyclers as well as provide incentives to close loops towards circularity.
2. It can help green brands verifiably unlock access to green capital by creating assets out of their carbon mitigation efforts as a result of quantifiable green practices. Tokens are minted at the time a green brand gets onboarded and commoditises its 'improved performance' compared to an average manufacturer or a government-set target for their ecological footprint. The greener the brand, the more tokens minted which then gets distributed as real world transactions take place between retailers, consumers and recyclers.
3. It helps wholesalers, retailers and exporters discover green brands and ethically meet their regulatory obligations by reducing their Scope 3 emissions as result of their engagement with green brands.
4. Overall, it intends to build a movement towards carbon insets over carbon offsets. Where a business or even a consumer put their money where they mouth is. They reward their own value chain and earn a significant net uptick to bottom lines in return. Everybody wins on Lumen!

Challenges we ran into

Putting together this entire flow was a massive challenge in the limited time, as this is a complex implementation and we wanted to communicate the essence in the limited time we had. This meant cutting out large parts of the idea and reducing it to a barebones MVP that hopefully messages the essence while showcasing its usability on base.

Additional Features

NA. We literally went from ideating to MVP during this buildathon. The community in India is mad helpful and this was insanely fun! We've all learnt a lot doing this and hope to continue building this out.