How Sustainable Are You?

Our Inspiration

We have noticed around NCSSM that there are a lot of issues with sustainability. Students often leave lights on when they leave the room, forget to recycle, and throw away food without using it. We wanted to address these issues, but we didn’t want to overwhelm students with negativity and too much information. Through this project, we aim to raise awareness on different simple actions students can take in their everyday lives to be more sustainable people in a way that is interactive and interesting, but also allows students to evaluate their day-to-day choices. So we came up with this quiz, which lets students answer a series of questions about sustainability in their lives, and rates their sustainability levels while also providing detailed recommendations for how to improve.

What it does

Our project aims to provide users with alternative ways to live their lives in a more sustainable way. We also aim to provide students with some guidance as to how they can make their lives more sustainable because it can be hard to navigate that sometimes. Overall, we want to raise students’ awareness of sustainability and any ways they are lacking sustainability in their own lives.

How our project solves this issue

Through the quiz, users will gain a better understanding of how sustainable their lifestyles are. At the end of the quiz, they will be assessed on how environmentally friendly their practices are. Additionally, they will be suggested products to replace their current products.

How we built it

To build our quiz, we used Atom as our database for coding, and used three programming languages: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In addition, we used US EPA Sustainability Resources.

Challenges we ran into

We had some trouble trying to determine which sustainability issues we wanted to focus on since there are so many issues we could have focused on. We had to choose the most relevant issues, which took some back and forth discussions.
It was also challenging to try and figure out how to teach users about sustainability in an interactive yet informative way. We went through several ideas before settling on a quiz.
We also recognize that having access to sustainable resources and practices is not feasible for everyone, as they are more expensive than environment-harming products.