EnviroPack

Inspiration- My inspiration was when I got a package from Amazon. By this time most of my packages that were sent were not optimized and wasted a lot of resources. This particular package I received was a keyboard and mouse. The packaging used that was a huge cardboard box but only 10% of the box was being used and there were also a bunch of packing peanuts and bubble wrap. I had to throw all the packaging away except the cardboard box because packing peanuts and bubble wrap aren't recyclable. I then realized that packaging for shipments in the country is really bad for the environment and inefficient, the sheer numbers are crazy, in fact 30% of all waste in the US is just from packaging, and of this 91% of it ends up in a landfill or the ocean. By making the packaging optimized I would save a lot of trash from harming the environment and I would improve the environment and reduce trash pollution. I would also save a lot of money for the shippers.

What it does- Our website uses a machine learning model to optimize packaging for shipments based on fragility, dimensions, weight, and the users' budget. The goal of our website is to drastically reduce waste in packaging by giving users more environmentally safe packaging methods without making them spend large amounts of money.

How we built it

I used HTML, CSS, and Python along with Flask to tie it together and that is how we built the front end. For the ML model I used Python and Tensorflow

Challenges we ran into

The challenges I ran into were related to the ML model. I had to do research about each packaging product and then find data for it too. This took a lot of time and I had to make my own data since I couldn't find a dataset. I had to rank the different materials in different categories(size, fragility, strength, cost, environmental friendliness, etc.). This took a very long time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of making a successful and accurate machine learning model. I am very proud I got a working prototype.

What we learned

We learned how to make a machine learning model to successfully solve a big problem. We also learned to connect a UI with a backend machine learning model and to present a user with options of what to do based on our model.

What's next for EnviroPack

The next steps are to fix up the UI a bit and launch. I also want to add more features as this is just a prototype so later we will ask for more questions and will likely charge for this service.