17 | O akville B eaver | T hursday,F ebruary 18,2021 insidehalton.com Prearranging your funeral is a thoughtful act. AWay to ShowYouCareAboutYour Family Main Office: 600 Spring Gardens Road, Burlington, ON L7T 1J1 • The Roman Catholic Episcopal Corporation of the Diocese of Hamilton in Ontario Holy Family Catholic Cemetery offers options for both traditional casket burial and cremation. Prearranging now means your family will avoid having to make decisions during their time of grief. Contact us today to discuss your wishes and options. Call 905-522-7727 or 1-800-661-5985, or visit our website to find out more. www.thecatholiccemeteries.ca Hire a Co-op student for May! As Canada's first college to offer co-operative education, we know the value it offers students and employers. mohawkcollege.ca/co-op After a weekend of end- less snacks and long, caf- feine-fuelled hours, a group of Western Universi- ty students -- including Oakville's Cem Torun -- co-founded Neutral, a startup that allows online shoppers to join the fight against the climate crisis. It was last February, when Torun and his team took first prize at Stanford University's TreeHacks hackathon competition for their browser extension that calculates the estimat- ed carbon footprint of every online purchase. Users can also then offset their emis- sions by donating to non- government organizations working on climate change initiatives, from their shop- ping cart, he explained. "Neutral, at its core, helps users become more conscious of their online shopping habits and lets them offset their purchase with the click of a button. Climate change is a daunt- ing issue, but we've made it so simple to join the fight against the crisis that any- one can start," said Torun, a 21-year-old Western com- puter science and business student. The Neutral communi- ty has grown to more than 1,200 users. "In this concerted effort to tackle the climate crisis, we've had the pleasure of joining and learning from the incredible scientists, entrepreneurs, and activ- ists at the front line .... more than ever, we feel en- ergized to continue build- ing the technological solu- tions needed to mobilize communities of people to act on the climate crisis." The web extension is available on Chrome, Fire- fox and Edge and can be downloaded from https:// shopneutral.io. "Our users can browse through Amazon's hun- dreds of thousands of prod- ucts and clearly under- stand their carbon foot- print, as well as offset their purchases with just a few clicks. Users can view their impact for free, but if they wish to offset their pur- chases they can donate to an NGO, usually around 50 cents, to offset the carbon emissions of their online purchase," he said. Funded by Mozilla, Neutral has already offset more than 100,000 pounds of CO2. "Moving forward, we're determined to grow our im- pact at scale. With such an energetic community, we hope to rally the voices and actions of our community and use our collective in- fluence to hold institutions accountable for their sup- ply chain, environmental, and sustainability practic- es. Moving into the new year, we can't wait to drive real, systemic change, at scale." SHOPPING SUSTAINABLY - SIMPLIFIED Cem Torun is the co-founder of Neutral, a browser extension that tracks your carbon footprint when online shopping. Graham Paine/Metroland NEWS LOCAL STUDENT CO-FOUNDS CARBON FOOTPRINT TRACKING TOOL "Neutral at its core helps users become more conscious of their online shopping habits and lets them offset their purchase with the click of a button." - Cem Torun