CarbonWatch

Inspiration

The theme for this Hackathon was "Building Better Communities". We believe that elevated levels of awareness and knowledge of how much CO2 emissions we produce will cause more individuals and communities to take action against climate change. By raising awareness and responsibility, more people will be inspired to foster corporate accountability and adopt sustainable lifestyle choices.

Thus, we developed a simple carbon footprint calculator to estimate one's carbon footprint. Although there were some good ecological footprint calculators online, there were no carbon footprint calculators that were short and user-friendly.

What it does

It calculates the carbon footprint of the person by a series of questions (approximately 12) and compares it to the CO2 sequestered by x amount of tree seedlings grown for 10 years or how x many acres of U.S forests are in one year.

How we built it

We did a lot of research into how we could calculate the carbon footprint. We divided the CO2 emissions caused by a person into six groups and selected questions for each group so that we could come up with an approximately accurate carbon footprint. Although there were many websites discussing carbon footprint, the mathematical formula behind calculating them were not written for the most part. We did really extensive research to get these formulas for our app. We even emailed the Global Footprint Network to get the national yields, equivalent factors, and calculation factors and got them.

Challenges we ran into

Our teammates were living in different time zones and half of our group hadn't participated in a hackathon before so assigning tasks correctly and getting used to GitHub was something we as a group found really hard. We had a lot of GitHub issues as 2 people in our group had not used them.

Secondly, collecting data for this project was immensely difficult. Coming up with ways to output an approximate carbon footprint required a lot of mathematical thinking and graph analysis. Luckily, we were able to come up with calculation factors for many of the questions through extensive research and graph analysis.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The fact that we thought to send a cold email to the Global Footprint Network asking for their license.

What we learned

We all learned new programming languages on our way to building this project. We also learned how to communicate more effectively with each other, running things on Flask, Github, etc.