Ecoscan

Inspiration

Contribute to society in the long term by proposing an app that helps people make a sustainable decision about the food they are buying.

What it does

Our application takes a picture of the bar code in order to find more information about the product. It will then show the user whether the product is sustainable or not. It will show the carbon footprint of the product, the packaging impact, the origin of the ingredient, and many more.

How we built it

The user interface was build using dash form Plotly.

We used APIs in order to find information about the product such as the carbon footprint of the product, the packaging impact, the distance between the manufacturer and the user.

Our algorithm determines whether the food is sustainability of the product. It uses a point score that tally's to the total amount of point the product gets using a threshold.

Challenges we ran into

A big issue we came across was to try and find an API to read the bar code. The API we originally found didn't give enough information about the product, and our developer was losing hope. We were able to find a better API to help in reading the bar code.

We also had an issue with the Google Maps API we used. We were not able to find the distance between the user and the manufacturer if they are separated by a sea. We solved this issue by using the latitude and longitude to find the distance.