The idea started with the realization that legal tools to hold polluters accountable already exist. Under the Clean Water Act, any citizen who witnesses an illegal discharge has standing to file a formal complaint and trigger an investigation. The problem is that actually using it is nearly impossible for most people. Multiple agencies have overlapping jurisdiction. The forms are designed for lawyers. Most people who witness something wrong give up before filing anything. FileForEarth is designed to bridge that gap.
The most interesting technical challenge was the EPA ECHO API and geospatial facility matching. The EPA maintains public records on every permitted facility in the country, including inspection histories, violation counts, and permit conditions. What we didn't expect was how accessible and detailed that data actually is.
Someone opens the app, grants location access, and within seconds, they can see the nearest permitted facilities, their permit status, and their violation history over the past three years. That information has always been public. The gap was just that nobody had made it accessible at the right moment, in the right format, for the right person.
We used Kiro IDE and started by using the vibe code feature to explain our idea and features to Kiro, and let it give us a detailed scaffold of the program and our next steps. We then went into specs and fleshed out the details of each tab, each feature, and most importantly, the creation of the ready-to-file legal complaint report.
Built With
- api
- kiro
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