equiva | Devpost

Inspiration

One of the common difficulties with trying to live a more eco-friendly life is that it can be difficult to know whether your decisions actually have an environmental impact or to know what you can do as a single consumer in a big factory-driven society.

What it does

Equiva is a shopping platform that aims to give its users a greater eco-awareness of their product consumption. It does so by providing information like a companie’s usage of energy/waste to produce their product and also gives users a way to “counteract” the negative effects of each product by donating to a charity that helps improve an issue associated with either the product you're buying or the environmental issues that that product's creation develops.

How we built it

The shopping platform website aspect was planned out on a whiteboard and designed using Figma. While our graphics team was hammering out the details for the design, our other members focused on developing the website, using extra tools like Firebase for authentication and databases and other tools.

Challenges we ran into

Beyond the obvious challenge of having to create a viable product in such a short period of time, my team also accidentally committed changes that rewrote our code and caused everything we had on the main page, to no longer work. However, learning how to reverse those challenges gave everyone a greater understanding of how source control works and how to resolve similar problems.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team is proud that we were able to create a product that is representative of our vision and that our website is more than just a couple of lines of text. We were able to learn how to use Firebase storage and authentication and actually get it to work so that’s awesome!!

What we learned

We learned how to delegate tasks when it comes to creating a large project that hackathons typically have and we also had to learn more about source control specifically through Github, as I mentioned earlier.

What's next for equiva

While Equiva does offer a unique take on shopping platforms, it is difficult for Equiva to compete with already established platforms like Amazon or Walmart’s own shopping platforms. Thus, we aim to offer an Equiva add-on that can be used on top of already established shopping platforms in order to compare prices and still identify environmental impacts. We would also want to give sellers on the platform an incentive to make more environmentally conscious decisions.