Tracks:
Most Sustainable, Best Beginner, Most On Theme
Inspiration
When we saw the track of ‘most sustainable’, we knew we wanted to find a way to contribute to helping the global climate change crisis, however small scale and amateur our project may begin as.
What it does
Our project is a carbon footprint calculator that calculates the amount of carbon emissions a user produces in a day. Our focus is on the everyday factors that you can most easily control, such as your household energy use, personal travel, and emissions from food. We hope to bring awareness to these small and big things we as humans are doing that are hurting our planet, unintentionally or not, and inform users that our carbon footprint can be significantly reduced by making even minor adjustments to your daily schedule.
How we built it
For the development of the website, our tech stack consisted of Python, Brevo, MySQL, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. As we built our website from ground-up, our graphics were created by ourselves using Canva. The submission data is stored in a SQL database and passwords are encrypted using the Bcrypt function in Flash, to ensure there are no data leaks. To create the questions and calculate a daily summation of carbon emission of a user, we scoured reports from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Challenges we ran into
Some challenges that we faced were those pertaining to creating the website and data collection. Creating a dynamic graph with the datasets was particularly difficult. We also were faced with the task of communicating the database’s statistics to our weekly customized email subscription, but we solved this with our knowledge of API requests. There was also a lot of data to sort through in the reports from government agencies and our other sources to create the questions and other pages.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We’re honestly proud of this entire project. For being first-time hackers, we believe we put our best efforts in planning, scaling, and implementing our project. Specifically, we are proud of successfully blending various programming languages and scripts.
What we learned
Through this 12 hour process, we learned a lot. Since data collection and analysis were at the heart of the project, sorting through vast amounts of information from trusted sources (e.g., the EPA) and transforming that data into actionable insights was a crucial skill we learnt. We also learned the many tiny details involved with incorporating an API into our project; this was a time-consuming aspect of our project. The project is a direct response to the climate crisis and had a meaningful goal, which brought a real sense of purpose to us.
What's next for Path To Zero
There are so many future improvements that could be made to our project. The first, main one would be publishing this website after we learn how to do so to truly reach the impact we hope for it to have. It could implement a gamified system where users earn badges or points for reducing their carbon footprint. These could be tied to real-world rewards or incentives, like discounts on sustainable products. It could also use machine learning algorithms to provide more personalized suggestions based on a user’s behavior patterns. For example, if a user regularly drives a gasoline car, the system could suggest nearby public transportation options or carpooling based on their location. Or it could integrate with IoT (Internet of Things) devices like smart thermostats, lights, and appliances. This would allow the platform to automatically track household energy use in real time, providing even more accurate data and recommendations. The users could also get a more comprehensive view of their environmental impact if we expand the categories of emissions tracked, such as water usage, clothing consumption, or even digital carbon footprints (e.g., streaming videos or using AI tools). By incorporating these improvements, the project could become a more powerful tool for users.
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