BeSustainable

Inspiration 💡

As college students juggling heavy coursework, navigating the path to address global issues can feel overwhelming. Recognizing this challenge, we brainstormed solutions for busy individuals like us to contribute to sustainability. The result is BeSustainable. We are motivated by the idea that individual actions can have a ripple effect, sparking significant change. BeSustainable isn't just an app; it's a movement. Our belief is that by spreading the word about our app, we can empower the average person to contribute to creating a more sustainable world without interpreting their daily lives. We strive to make a difference with BeSustainable, one small step at a time.

What it does 🪴

• Encourage sustainability - The primary goal is to increase the sustainability habits of individuals in the world.
• Empower individuals - BeSustainable strives to uplift the average person to contribute small but impactful changes towards sustainability.
• Facilitate daily integration - We aim to smoothly integrate sustainable practices into people's lives, enhancing health and well-being without significant disruptions.

How we built it 🛠️

• Designs with Figma
• Frontend was built using MaterialsUI
• Backend was built using next.js
• Database MongoDB
• Spoonacular API
• Google OCR

Challenges we ran into ⌛️

• Design challenges include balancing creativity and feasibility like the flow of the camera page and wanting to add more features to increase user interactions.
• A frontend challenge was getting used to MaterialsUI Framework and knowing which components to use and was most convenient for our app. Knowing how to format each component to ensure that it follows the designs made for the app.
• Merge conflicts!
• We faced challenges in finding a quantitative way to create a sustainability score via a list of ingredients alongside gaining the data of the ingredients in an efficient manner from the barcode and ingredients list scans.
• We had trouble connecting the MongoDB with our project. We also had a difficult time working with Auth0 in order to create successful login/registration.

Accomplishments that we're proud of 👏🏼

• We are proud to have created BeSustainable with the intention of increasing sustainability in average people’s lives one step at a time.
• Our application has a simple and easy-to-use interface that allows the user to quickly access the data through their mobile device.
• We are also proud of being able to learn new technology in order to create a working app.

What we learned 📔

• Our group gained insightful lessons through the development of our application BeSustainable. Some of which are:
  • Discussing the flows and features of the application through the process so we’re on the same page.
  • Creating a general timeline for completing tasks and assigning roles to quicken the development process.

What's next for BeSustainable ⏭️

• We would in the future add an AI chatbot that will be able to give recommendation, feedback, as well as additional info the user asks for about any given ingredients!
• Furthermore, we would like to encourage users to exchange contacts through the app to interact with their friends' posts. As a user obtains a certain sustainability score, they would be able to connect with others around the world rather than just locally.

Built With

• auth0
• figma
• google-cloud-vision
• materials-ui
• mongodb
• nextjs
• ocr
• open-ai
• spoonacular
• zxing-decoder