Eco.Club

Club helping build a Better Climate-Friendly Carbon-Free World

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Inspiration

We're building eco.club as we realised, today, it wasn't easy to make MEANINGFUL CONTRIBUTIONS EASILY in helping preserve the environment. We noticed two main challenges people who're enthusiastic about helping in the fight against climate change face:

  1. CONFUSED - Lack of Information & Open Conversations
  2. Monetary DONATIONS - How & Where?

What it does

eco.club is a one stop destination for you to do your bit in this endeavour to help the environment.

  • eco.lens Want to know how to help reduce your carbon footprint? Click a picture of any product that you use or about to buy. eco.lens uses Machine Learning to identify the product and help you calculate the carbon footprint of the product in the image.

  • eco.pay Users often fail to develop a habit to contribute regularly to Campaigns and Organisations helping in this fight. Whenever you make any online payment anywhere, eco.pay automatically nudges the user to donate 1% - 5% of the amount through our platform. Any donations made are automatically routed to getchange.io, which matches every donation, and forwards the funds collected to Campaigns around the world.

  • eco.crew You use glass bottles instead of plastic ones? Share your efforts with the world with eco.crew! A social portal for users to share their daily efforts and knowledge to help others learn more, and promote eco friendly practices and articles.

  • eco.bits We value your time! eco.bits are bite-sized short articles or videos to help you gain knowledge, inspiration or ideas quickly and efficiently in swipeable card formats.

How we built it

  • eco.club is a complete Mobile Application developed using Dart & Flutter.
  • We used FireBase as our data store, and FireBase ML-Kit for Object Detection in eco.lens.
  • We developed a Node.JS server which acts as our backend. It is responsible for interacting with carbon-footprint API, and returning the carbon footprint in eco.lens. It also stores all donation data and routes all payments to getchange.io.
  • The backend node server is hosted on Heroku.
  • We used StoryBlok CMS to dynamically and easily publish data for eco.bits.

Challenges we ran into

  • SMS detection wasn't possible in background at all times, but had a timeout of few minutes.
  • Carbon Footprint Database / APIs are not easily and freely available.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

  • Climate change is real, and we hope eco.club makes it easier for users to help prevent climate change.
  • We learnt how to integrate our front-end with StoryBlok CMS. StoryBlok has been really helpful and easy to use to publish content dynamically on to multiple platforms!
  • Reading incoming SMS automatically by our app, and extracting the payment information was something that we did for the first time.
  • We integrated with FireBase ML to easily apply machine learning to our images.

What's next for Eco.Club

  • Integrate with a payments infrastructure
  • Adding functionality to monitor SMSs for online payments at all times in the background
  • Generating revenue by either charging a bare minimum processing fees for all transactions, or generating revenue from all deposits made to us.

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