Carborundum

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Inspiration

The concentration of carbon emissions produced by humans has doubled over the last 60 years, yet we continue to take a business-as-usual approach, in turn killing our people, wildlife, and habitat. Many of our projects around the world focus on immediate issues such as hunger, education and poverty and often projects seek the cheapest solutions such as open fires and cheap materials as they are uneducated in the issues of carbon emissions. But its not too late. As responsible individuals, the best way to combat climate crisis is by making efforts to offset our carbon footprint. This can be achieved to a great extent by planting trees, wherein each tree can offset at least 0.07 tons of CO2 annually. It may be impractical for a person to engage in reforestation of such a huge scale, but it can be achieved indirectly by making donations to support efforts and organizations which engage in large-scale replantation. I decided on building a project which helps everyone do their bit to tackle their carbon footprint.

What it does

Carborundum is a decentralized application (DApp) which can be used by individuals to financially support reforestation efforts and thereby offset their carbon footprint. The individual can visit the DApp and enter their annual carbon footprint, the DApp then shows the number of trees that should be planted in order to offset it with the amount being $1 for each tree. The user can donate this amount in cryptocurrency, in terms of ETH tokens. The donation is directly made to the organization, without the need for intermediaries and with low-transaction costs. This is by virtue of blockchain technology and the system is privacy preserving in nature and does not collect any personal details of the user.

How we built it

The decentralized application (DApp) has been built with web3JS and the front-end was built with ReactJS and MUI. The smart contracts have been coded in Solidity, using the Truffle framework and were tested using the Ganache local blockchain. I made use of the Metamask wallet to connect with the DApp and send transactions.

Challenges we ran into

A major challenge that I faced was time-constraints. I also struggled a bit in building the front-end of the DApp as I did not much have experience in front-end development.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm proud of the fact that I was able to complete a project of this scale within the limited time period of the hackathon. I also take pride in having been able to build a socially relevant project, which would hopefully enable people to realize the impact of their carbon emissions and make efforts to combat climate change.

What we learned

I learned about using MUI and its components with ReactJS to build the front-end. I also learned about the various factors which affect climate change and the actions that would be taken to fight the impending climate crisis.

What's next for Carborundum

• Machine learning to identify trends
• NFT rewards to encourage contributions

Built With

• css
• mui
• react
• solidity
• web3