EcoWealth

Kingsley Szeto, Josh Choe, Carter Stambaugh

Inspiration

While walking through the streets of LA, we often incur litter on a day to day basis. Sometime's its the lone burger wrapper or a sparsely filled cup of coffee lying to its side with a plastic straw sticking out. Many of us pass buy these things, yet the _ majority _ of us, including the devs, evaluate the act of picking the trash out as too risky. We don't know where it has been; the flu season combined with LA's other numerous problems prevent us from acting on our desire to protect our communities - and Earth - from human made pollutants. Because we're in Southern California, this trash moves and ultimately accumulates itself into Westwood, Los Angeles at UCLA our beaches and oceans. There are many ways to prevent massive beach cleanups from being needed in the first place. EcoWealth does this by encouraging users to donate money for the people making a marginal difference in the city streets and our beaches, which in turn encourages more people to pick up after others. However, the social media aspect of EcoWealth aims to stimulate awareness in people - by unconsciously reducing consumption to reduce material and carbon footprints while also disrumpting other habits and waste / disposal habits to prevent littering in the first place.

What it does

EcoWealth crowdsources money to people willing to clean up after other people. Think of the main feed as Instagram - but instead of influencers and food, there's trash! Of course, there's also the cleanup result. The posts of trashed areas acts analagously to Uber/Lyft requests - anyone can submit a request for a place to be cleaned. Likewise, anybody can take the request and get paid for it. In the meantime, an electronic transaction - something like a hybrid of a Venmo payment and a GoFundMe occurs in preparation of the person or people who tackle the trash challenge. Additionally, when a trash-post request is made, it's location is tracked to ultimately create a heat map of trash in the area. That way, people can either deliberately hunt for hotspots or find some easy tasks nearby, while lurkers can see the impact of thousands people and their consumption habits. Messaging is also available between profiles for confirmation of payments or just friendly chatting.

How we built it

EcoWealth is built on the Flutter platform by Google, which allows seamless compatibility between iOS and Android devices as well as full web-browsers (however, this app is intended for on the go use). Everything within the app is Google-grown - from the dart / flutter code to the Google Maps API calls, the Firebase to store photos and user data, and of course sign-in with Google to top it all off.

Challenges we ran into

The three of us have never worked with Flutter. Two of us had prepared to use Flutter, and worked on the front-end but even more back-end elements of the app. Flutter makes front-end development fairly easy to look aesthetically pleasing while giving the user a seamless experience. However, our experience with the back-end has been all but seamless. It took hours to get the messaging platform to work and hours to be able to connect Firebase to our UI elements for display. Our product is mostly finished, but there are still issues involving connections to Firebase that we do not know how to fully resolve.

What we learned / accomplishments that we're proud of

For two of us, HackSC is our first large scale collegiate hackathon (36 hours!). It's impressive that we have a largely finished product to DevPost. It was very challenging getting everything done on time - but nevertheless we were able to create something from the ground up. For others, it is our first time going through with app development, and learning Flutter has motivated us to keep diving into App Development in the future. Flutter has been very easy to work with - especially with UI/UX aesthetics, and our UI is something to be proud of despite being new to front-end design. In all, we're proud of being able to learn Flutter with conjunction to other Google APIs to create an app.

What's next for EcoWealth

To fully dive into sustainability, EcoWealth should then focus on reducing consumption on food, consumer goods, and transportations. Hopefully, it can become a informative social media platform for people who want to share ways to reduce their carbon footprint (and consequently litter). However, its ultimate goal is to normalize conscious thinking when approaching how we consume goods. That way, we will be able to unconscioussly make sustainable lifestyle choices, the same way some people unconscioussly carelessly throw trash everywhere. However, with a method of prevention, we hope that climate change can be adverted. Additionally, ways to prevent people from finding loopholes or taking advantage of the system should be prioritized.

Photos

Our photos are too big to upload :(

Built With

• cloudfirestorage
• dart
• firebase
• flutter
• gcp
• google-maps
• googlecloudplatform