Landing Page
Dashboard
What If
Community Feed
Leaderboard
Achievements
Learning Page(Still developing)

Carbon Zero 🌱

Inspiration

Climate change can often feel like a problem that is too large for an individual to influence. We wanted to change that perspective by making personal carbon reduction visible, motivating, and engaging.

Our inspiration was simple: people already understand how games work—challenges, XP, streaks, levels, achievements, and leaderboards. So why not apply the same mechanics to sustainable habits?

Instead of making people feel guilty about their carbon footprint, Carbon Zero turns climate action into a game you actually want to play.

What We Built

Carbon Zero is a gamified carbon-reduction platform that helps users understand and reduce the impact of their everyday choices.

Users can:

🌍 Estimate their monthly carbon footprint
🎯 Take personalized daily challenges
⚡ Earn XP for sustainable actions
🔥 Build streaks and level up
🏆 Compete on global and friend leaderboards
🏅 Unlock achievements and badges
👥 Share progress through a community feed
🔮 Use What If? to compare lifestyle scenarios
🌱 See the collective impact of their actions through My Planet
🤖 Learn about sustainability through AI-powered personalized learning

The core loop is intentionally simple:

Estimate → Choose a challenge → Log the action → Earn XP → Track impact → Repeat

This turns sustainable behavior into a continuous feedback loop rather than a one-time activity.

How We Built It

We built Carbon Zero as a modern web application using React + TypeScript, with Vite, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui, and Framer Motion powering the frontend experience.

For the backend, we used Supabase for authentication, PostgreSQL data storage, real-time subscriptions, and Edge Functions.

We focused heavily on the experience itself—using a forest-inspired visual design, glassmorphism, animations, responsive layouts, and real-time updates to make the platform feel more like a game than a traditional carbon calculator.

The onboarding was designed to be short and accessible, getting a user from signup to their first footprint score in roughly two minutes.

What We Learned

Building Carbon Zero taught us that solving a climate problem isn't only about providing information. People need feedback, motivation, and a reason to keep coming back.

We also learned how different pieces of a modern product fit together—from authentication and databases to real-time data, gamification mechanics, responsive UI, and personalized learning.

Most importantly, we learned to think about sustainability not just as an awareness problem, but as a behavior-change problem.

Challenges We Faced

One of our biggest challenges was finding the right balance between environmental impact and engagement. We didn't want gamification to distract from the purpose of the platform.

We also had to design a system where different actions could contribute to a consistent progress and XP system while keeping the experience simple enough for a new user to understand immediately.

Another challenge was bringing multiple experiences—Dashboard, What If?, Community, Leaderboard, Achievements, My Planet, and LearnAI—into one coherent user journey instead of making them feel like disconnected features.