EcoGo

Small changes, big impact

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Inspiration

Have you ever wondered how your daily household products can impact the environment? Seemingly unharmful products may contain ingredients that might be toxic to the environment. As awareness about this issue grows, individuals may seek to make informed choices but lack the time or reliable sources to conduct thorough analyses of the impact of their consumption patterns on the environment. Consequently, a pressing challenge exists to facilitate timely, credible, and convenient access to information that empowers individuals to make informed and environmentally responsible decisions.

What it does

We have come up with a solution to provide people with an enabling platform to assess and understand the risks their choices pose to the environment and thus make informed and sustainable decisions to prevent any damage to the environment. Our app is designed to help individuals make informed and environmentally responsible decisions by providing them with easy access to information about the impact of ingredients in household products on the environment.

Our app mainly aims to contribute towards the 12th United Nations Sustainable Development Goal, which is to ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns. We are making it possible for consumers to make informed choices, which in turn ensures sustainable consumption.

How we built it

  1. The user can download the app to their phone to choose the product category and query any product through a quick barcode scan or a textual search to know its ecological impact.
  2. The app connects to the cloud and performs an API call to fetch the entered product; it then performs a database query to search for the product. If product details are not found in Firebase, an API call to the trained model deployed on Google Cloud is made, and the results are stored in the Firestore Database.
  3. Once the results are fetched, the user will be directed to the analysis screen that will display the product's overall, aquatic, and environmental impact.
  4. The user can browse through the individual tabs to learn more about the impact of each of the ingredients.
  5. The user can also browse alternatives for the searched product in the Similar Products tab and, thereby, may choose to buy a product that has a lesser environmental impact.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge we faced while building our code was deploying our API on Google Cloud. Initially, we decided to deploy the Flask API on Google Cloud App Engine. While the app was functioning, we encountered some challenges that led us to re-evaluate our system design. Firstly, we realized that Compute Engine's fixed infrastructure made scaling more difficult, and we were not able to use resources efficiently. Secondly, we experienced issues with conflicts between different parts of the application, which led to slow performance. To address the above issue, we took several technical decisions and implementations which led us to learn about Google Cloud Run. It allows for greater flexibility and scalability when compared to Google Cloud App Engine. The deployment process and scaling allowed for efficient resource utilization. Deploying the Flask API as a container provided greater control over the environment in which it runs. As containers are isolated and self-contained, they reduce the risk of conflicts with other applications and ensure consistency across different deployment environments. We realized that containerization allows for easier maintenance and updates of the Flask API. Changes to the API can be made to the container and then deployed seamlessly, without affecting other parts of the application. We also made adjustments to our container deployment process. We modified our container configurations to match the requirements of our API, optimizing our container image size to improve performance, and using Google Cloud's container debugging tools to diagnose and fix issues. This allowed us to easily manage and deploy our containers in a scalable, highly available, and secure environment, which helped us to address performance issues and improve the reliability of our API.

Realizing the benefits of this new approach, we decided to migrate our app from Compute Engine to Cloud Run. The migration process was seamless, and we experienced immediate improvements in performance and scalability.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. Increased awareness: The app will educate people about the impact of the ingredients in the products they use, leading to increased awareness about the environmental impact of their choices. Better consumer choices: With increased awareness, consumers will be able to make better choices about the products they use, opting for those with more environmentally friendly ingredients.
  2. Reduced environmental impact: With more people making environmentally-friendly choices, there will be a reduction in the environmental impact of the products people use, leading to a healthier and more sustainable planet.
  3. Pressure on manufacturers: With more consumers making environmentally-friendly choices, manufacturers will be pressured to produce products with more sustainable ingredients, leading to a shift towards more environmentally friendly production practices.

Overall, the app will positively impact the environment by increasing awareness, promoting better consumer choices, reducing the environmental impact of products, and pressuring manufacturers to adopt more sustainable practices.

What we learned

During the hackathon, we learned the power of collaboration and innovation. We discovered how diverse skill sets can come together to solve complex problems, the importance of quick iteration, and the value of creativity when faced with challenges. We also gained insights into effective time management, adapting to unexpected issues, and the significance of feedback in refining our solutions. Ultimately, the experience taught us the importance of never falling in love with our code, regularly evaluating our system design, and being open to exploring new solutions. By embracing new technologies and architectures, we can build better, more efficient, scalable, and cost-effective apps. Overall, it was a journey that highlighted the limitless possibilities when driven by passion and a shared goal.

What's next for EcoGo

  1. Extend our app to include various types of products over various categories.
  2. Improve the performance of the trained model by training over various datasets and improving its architecture.
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