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Introduction

Here at CarbonAltDel, we want to help you CTRL + ALT + DELETE your restaurant's carbon emissions and become a net zero business, serving the sustainability-conscious customers of tomorrow. Save money and save the planet, one net zero order at a time.

Check it out at www.carbonaltdel.tech (thanks domain.com!)

Inspiration

Both members of our team grew up in the family restaurant business, and Kei is a Head Pastry Chef working in a London restaurant. We wanted to build a product that would help our colleagues and friends working in the restaurant industry become more sustainable. Whether it's a high street fish and chip shop or a 1 Michelin Star restaurant, we want to be there to support restaurants in their sustainability journey.

This project was originally submitted to a mini hackathon for Athena Community x Lloyds Banking Group, and we wanted to add more features to help restaurants handle additional scopes of emissions such as scope 1 and scope 2. Due to time limitations, we couldn't add these features in the last hack so we wanted to refine and add features for the recycled theme for SustainHacks.

Problem Statement

We’ve highlighted three main problems that restaurants are facing, based on our research and speaking to restaurant owners. One, Restaurants are currently concerned about their ingredient cost which are increasing globally. Two, research shows that scope 3 emissions, which lie outside of the restaurants own operations make up 89% of emissions for restaurants. However, it is often the hardest to address as restaurants cannot control this. Three, Restaurants don’t have the time to research and make a net zero plan as they are often short on staff. Clearly, restaurants have a lot of concerns when it comes to becoming net zero.

Features added

Authentication- users can now sign up and login
Past orders can be viewed from account page
Individual order history can be checked, with total price and emissions
Whatsapp message is sent with order details via Twilio

What it does

CarbonAltDel is a platform that helps UK restaurants compare and order their ingredients with one-click, showing up-to-date prices and carbon emissions of everything a restaurant needs. Not only that, restaurants can track their carbon emissions and offset them with each order using carbon credits, making every single order carbon neutral.

We hope that this easy-to-use website will help restaurants achieve quick wins in their Net Zero journey, helping them and their team make the sustainable choice, the easy choice.

We want to promote our restaurants who are on their Net Zero journey with certificates to show their sustainability efforts to their customers, helping them stand out in the competitive restaurant scene.

Not only that, we want to work with local suppliers to reduce their carbon emissions in the supply chain and become net zero as well from cradle to gate, helping them to win more business with our restaurants and reduce their environmental impact.

How we built it

For the frontend, we prototyped in HTML and custom CSS, then we rebuilt it with React and ContextAPI for state management.
We used Django to build a REST API with PostgreSQL for the backend. They are deployed on Netlify/Vercel/Railway with a CI/CD pipeline into our GitHub Repo for frontend and backend.

Frontend + Backend Dev Environment Repo: https://github.com/trinayau/CarbonAltDel Backend Production Environment Repo: https://github.com/trinayau/CarbonAltDel-Server

Challenges we ran into

Time- losing the first 9 hours due to being in GMT+0, and members having work during this time. Learning Twilio and using Domain.tech for the first time, but it was simple to get started thanks to their extensive documentation.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successfully adding authentication using Simple JWT and Django
Adding ability to register, login and logout
Adding order model to database
Adding ability to place orders
Seeing all orders on account page
Adding Whatsapp messaging when order is successfully placed using Twilio
Seeing each individual order from account page

What we learned

Everyone has their own way of creating their e-commerce backend, we chose to minimise those expensive API calls by adding one API call to our Django REST API for each order when placed and using ContextAPI for cart functionality
Restaurants are doing great at handling scope 1 and 2 emissions, but tracking and managing scope 3 (indirect) emissions from their suppliers is the most difficult

- Therefore we tackled scope 3 emissions in this project

What's next for CarbonAltDel

This is not the end for CarbonAltDel! We have many more features planned to help streamline the sustainability journey for restaurants, tackling scope 1 & 2 emissions: