BU Carbon Footprint Tracker

We made a weekly carbon emissions tracker website! You input all of your weekly routes (ex. driving to school, taking the T to class, riding the bus, etc.) and it will calculate your emissions!

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Inspiration

In making this project, we were looking for a way to spread awareness about the problems our environment is facing. In today's world, we often negatively impact the environment in ways we don't even consider; specifically, we take our transportation for granted. Every car, bus, and T ride are all impacting the environment in ways we don't even think about! If we want to be part of the solution, and not the problem, this means being mindful about our carbon emissions in hopes of a brighter, cleaner future.

What it does

Our project is a website that tracks the user's carbon emissions every week, specifically for their transportation. Users add all of their daily routes (ex. taking the T from Warren to CGS) and how many times a week they use them. We then calculate the total weekly grams of C02 you generate, and supply some helpful comparisons to help users visualize their impact.

How we built it

For the backend of our project, we used Python to calculate the amount of carbon per route. This uses the Google Maps API to find the distance between two places depending on transportation type. We then use the Flask web framework to host each of our HTML pages.

Challenges we ran into

At first, we tried many different approaches in parallel for this project. We originally wanted to use a database, React, and some other features, but unfortunately, we couldn't get any of these approaches to work how we wanted within our time limit.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of our code! Our Python backend runs exactly how we envisioned it to, the Google API was easy to get working, and our HTML looks pretty!

What we learned

We learned a lot about web development and front-end development in general during this project. All of us had very little experience with front-end, so we had to make an effort to learn the intricacies of a web development. We also learned more about Google Cloud and how to integrate one of their many APIs into a project.

What's next for BU Carbon Footprint Tracker

In the future, we would love to continue improving and expanding our website. Eventually, we look forward to adding a database, adding more options/functionality to our calculator, and hosting the website on a domain.

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