CarbonRoute | Devpost

Inspiration

As students with diverse ethnic backgrounds, we have first hand seen the impacts of global warming in different parts of the world. Our goal of raising awareness of the consequences of global warning has done before, but no one has done it in the way we have. We wanted a way of showing users direct impact from their actions, and one of the most common actions someone can do is sending a package or receiving a package! Our project allows us to directly show the user the impact of their actions.

What it does

Imagine you're sending a gift to a friend or ordering supplies for your business. CarbonRoute transforms this simple act into a powerful decision for the planet. By entering where your package starts and ends its journey, our web-application calculates the carbon footprint of its travel. This better allows you, the user, to visualize the impact of your package on the environment and the earth, thus allowing you to make a more educated decision.

How we built it

Our project was built using: Flask React Google Maps API Carbon Footprint API Python JavaScript

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a lot of problems with the API requests and we had to do a lot of debugging in order to get a product that we were confident in and comfortable showing and presenting to you all. We had to look at the API documentations as well as the Flask documentation and when we put all of our brains together we were able to easily solve this problem.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have a stunning front end that is user friendly and is very easy to understand. Our back end also properly routes the API's and their requests, allowing the users to get a seamless experience when they are using our project.

What we learned

We enhanced our understandings of both Flask and React. We all also gained valuable experience when it comes to using and routing API's and their requests. It was a great crunch time learning experience that allowed us to break out of our shells and grow!

What's next for CarbonRoute

We want to use more ways to find out user carbon foot print, be it in electricity usage, flights, etc. We also want to show more illustrative examples of the impact that the user's carbon footprint may raise by making easily understandable comparisons!