GreenWear

Inspiration

Fashion industry is one of the largest polluters in the world causing increasingly more environmental damage. Our solution to mitigate this problem is responsible shopping, and we have created an mobile app that makes understanding the ecological impact of clothing purchases easy.

What it does

Once the user takes or uploads a photo of a garment's composition label (can be found on all retail clothes), GreenWear calculates an Eco-rating, indicating the overall sustainability of materials used in its production and estimated size of the carbon footprint created due to transportation from the manufacturing country. User gets the scores almost instantly, allowing them to conveniently and quickly make informed decisions about their purchases.

How we built it

We used React-Native as our mobile app development framework and utilised a number of libraries for our UI and text recognition functionalities. Haversine formula was the method we used to determine the distance between the user and the clothing manufacturer and to get an estimate of transportation carbon footprint. Lastly, our clothing material sustainability dataset was aggregated from a variety of online sources.

Challenges we ran into

It was difficult to come up with an objective measure of how sustainable and eco-friendly clothing materials are. Comparison of different materials (synthetic, natural, vegan etc.) required in-depth research and review of independent articles and papers.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The ease of use of our app, intuitive design.
Great app responsiveness and quick Eco-score calculations.

What we learned

We learnt how to divide tasks between team members to maximise productivity and delegate appropriate roles to certain members.
We explored a variety of text recognition APIs and learned to appreciate the wonders of navigating sparsely documented APIs and deprecated libraries.
We developed a method to compare the environmental impact of different clothing materials.