Inspiration
Our main inspiration comes from our feelings; we want to care for our environment and save our planet for future generations. However, we are used to thinking that only big corporations or the government can truly change the environmental situation. Our idea is to help people understand that even small steps matter, and we provide guidance on how to take action.
What it does
CUTthecarbon is a guided platform that calculates your personal lifestyle choices into a dynamic Carbon Score, which demonstrates how much carbon footprint you are producing. We use weekly data, such as transportation, shopping, eating habits, and flights. Additionally, we provide a PDF document with all calculations and recommendations on how people can adjust their lifestyle to reduce their carbon footprint.
How we built it
Frontend: React 19 and Vite 6 for speed, with Framer Motion for smooth, gamified animations. Backend: Node.js and Express 5, using JWT/bcryptjs for secure auth and Puppeteer for generating PDF carbon reports. API: A centralized Fetch-based API service that connects the UI to our carbon calculation engine. AI: Cursor
Challenges we ran into
One of the biggest challenges we faced was identifying a specific topic we wanted to explore. Also, since it was our first hackathon, we were confused about how to organize, plan, and divide the roles.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of creating this project overall because none of us had experience building such a big platform before, and it was also the first time practicing the implementation of a business model.
What we learned
We learned how to communicate within the group and how to split tasks among each other to improve the team's working speed. Also, it was one of our first times working with React.
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