BlueX

Inspiration

We understand that travel is an integral part of our lives, but it often comes at a cost to our environment. The amount of carbon dioxide that is emitted from vehicles into the oceans is very harmful to marine life as it makes the oceans more acidic, threatening the lives of these organisms. We want to shed light on these issues and provide travelers a way to balance out their carbon emissions specifically through offsetting this blue carbon and making up for their carbon emissions.

What it does

Through our website, we aim to provide users with information about how their travel journeys impact the environment. We do this through our carbon dioxide calculator which takes the users inputs of their origin, destination, and mode of transportation, then computes the total distance during their travel. With this, our calculator outputs the total carbon emissions from the journey the user specified. This amount is then converted into a monetary amount which you can then choose to offset. We also have information about ways the user can get involved with organizations mitigating the impact of carbon emissions.

How we built it

Our team developed the front-end components with HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and we were able to use Flask for the back-end. In the back-end, we queried data using the Carbon Footprint, Google Maps, and Google Places APIs.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into were learning how to implement the features we wanted in our website, from styling components to writing Python code to grab data. For most of our team, this was our first hackathon and first time using these programming languages. As we were building the website, we were also simultaneously learning and troubleshooting challenges which came up. Another major challenge was working on different components at the same time and merging our code successfully with Github. To resolve these challenges, it took a lot of communication and reading documentation!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of successfully creating a program that is useful and user friendly and educates users about their carbon footprint.
We’re also proud of learning so much during this hackathon and being able to produce a functional website from scratch

What we learned

This weekend we learned a lot about how Flask creates a frontend form for users to input their location data, and how to retrieve and process that data using 3 APIs. This allows us to calculate and display the carbon emissions and associated costs on the user interface. While implementing this idea, we also learned a lot about how carbon emissions impact the ocean and marine life.

What's next for BlueX

The next step for BlueX is to allow the user to add multiple trips and see the total carbon emission. If we had additional time, we would have implemented an informational page to educate users about eco-friendly practices and how they can contribute to environmental conservation. We also want to be able to provide accessibility to our website worldwide.