Concrete CO2 Monitor

Found in the internet, the amount of memes on this topic gives an indication of the dimension of the problem.

Inspiration

Concrete is one of the fundamental resources of state-of-the-art construction. In 2019 the Architect's Newspaper (https://www.archpaper.com/2019/01/concrete-production-eight-percent-co2-emissions/) claimed that 4.4bn tons of concrete are consumed yearly by humankind, and this number is and will grow continually. Apart from the increasing demand for sand (not Sahara Sand, but the one we also need for microchips), concrete unleashes incredible amounts of CO2 during production and drying. Due to its vast usage, the thereby emitted CO2 exceeds even the CO2 volume emitted by all trucks combined (https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/green-cement-struggles-to-expand-market-as-pollution-focus-grows). This fact is not reconcilable with climate change and planning to become sustainable. Consequently, it is inevitable to reduce the CO2 impact of concrete until we can revert to greener construction material.

What it does

The Concrete CO2 Monitor should turn construction site data into actions. It its first version it evaluates three dimension of construction sites in three dimensions:

Evaluation dimensions:
1. avoidable CO2 emissions
2. avoidable costs
3. a general aggregated sustainability score (also factoring in impact on traffic and communities next to the construction site)
Analysis dimensions:
1. waste of concrete (how many trucks are requested, but not needed)
2. suboptimal concrete material (too high quality is ordered to be on the safe side; the current data supply does not permit a rating, therefore assessments of construction engineers are needed)
3. Coincidence of concrete transportation and local traffic volume

How we built it

After careful consideration of the customer needs, we build our dashboard using a react template by Creative Tim.

Challenges we ran into

Setting up a front- and backend :) Due to time and experience obstacles, we could only develop a front end with no working backend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Developing a complete idea with concrete measures to improve our planet.

What we learned

Not only did we get deep insights into a fascinating industry and their challenges, we also learned frontend development, which is a valuable skill for the next Hackathon.