Litter Locator

Inspiration

The inspiration behind a project such as Litter Locator, stems from the idea of nurturing a well-rounded community that cares about the environment and comes together to combat urban littering.

What it does

Litter Locator is a website that allows users to both report and find areas with large amounts of litter in order to join forces and combat littering. Users who report litter may enter the address where they have found pollution. They can also provide photo evidence of such areas to help. Those who are willing to find litter can access a map that has been marked with areas that have been reported.

How we built it

Building our website was quite a hassle. We used streamlit, an open-source app framework based on Python. We used this to build our website, having one front page for introduction, and one page for the actual reporting and finding of litter.

Challenges we ran into

There were several challenges that we ran into during our hacking. The first of which was geocoding. Geocoding is the process of translating an address into coordinates. This process was hefty and took a lot of time to get right. Our second challenge was keeping our map updated. This meant that we had to keep track to previous data and it made it quite difficult to export variables from file to file. Ultimately, we decided to keep everything map-related in one file in order to stay organized. The challenges we ran into are part of our project and help us build our resilience against failure.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Breaking through geocoding was definitely our hardest challenge and our greatest accomplishment. Our whole idea is based on the fact that people are able to search for areas around them that are littered, and hence a map would be required. After trying numerous options, we seemed to have a dead end. However, after extensive research and hard work, we finally pushed through and achieved geocoding.

What we learned

Hackathons are all about the learning experience, and for one we can say that we have learned much. It was both our first time at a hackathon, and hence there was much to learn. From the severed sleeping schedule to the coding, we had to constantly adapt to the situation. We've learned much about Python, streamlit, and GitHub throughout our project, but however I would consider the greatest thing that we learned to be our resilience. We persevered through the hardships and ultimately concluded our project as we wished.

What's next for Litter Locator

The next step for Litter Locator is not its publication, but instead, it is for raising awareness. The whole point of Litter Locator was to form a community that cared for our environment and wanted to keep our greenspace green. Thus, it is not so important for us to launch our website, but instead to make sure our word and commitment are heard.