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  Landing - Hero Section

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  Landing - Why Section

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  Landing - How Section

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  Listings - Category & Area Section

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  Listings - Near You Section

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  Listings - Near You Map

Category: Responsible Consumption and Production (SDG #12)

Update: I am providing the information below as requested (I am no longer able to edit my submission):

• Country of residence: Japan
• demo website (same as "Try it out" link)
• GitHub repository
• Submitter type: individual

Inspiration

As someone who lives in a tiny apartment in Tokyo, I cannot afford to buy one-off appliances due to space constraint. If I want to recycle/donate unused goods, there is no seamless way to do that (e.g. local services only accept certain goods/appliances). Hence, I created a solution to increase goods' lifetime (and reduce its likeliness to go landfills) by creating a non-profit sharing platform called mottainai.

From Wikipedia: mottainai (Japanese: もったいない or 勿体無い) conveys a sense of regret over waste; the exclamation "mottainai!" can translate as "What a waste!".

What it does

mottainai connects people with excess goods to neighbors who need them. It is based on the non-profit model of sharing economy.

Anyone with a surplus of foods or household goods can create a listing on mottainai website, and they have the option to give it for free, or to rent it for a set period of time. The method of delivery is pick-up only (to reduce carbon footprint). And the time and place is determined by the givers.

On the receivers' side, they need to send a request for a listing before they are "matched" with the givers. They can also initiate a listing to request for a specific good.

How we built it

Dataset:

• OpenStreetMap on AWS
  • usage: the source of public spaces where neighbors can meet safely, e.g. park, garden, and playground
• High Resolution Population Density Maps + Demographic Estimates (not applied yet)
  • usage: an input for recruiting volunteers and recommendation feature

Public spaces from OpenStreetMap is extracted using a Go script.

The web frontend is a statically-generated website built on top of Next.js and it is deployed to Cloudflare Pages. The backend API is responsible for managing users and listings and it will be deployed to Cloudflare Workers (not finished yet).

For more technical information, please check mottainai's repository.

Challenges we ran into

(Product-specific challenge) thinking how to:

• discourage bad actors
• minimize (or eliminate) low-quality goods

Idea:

• Require residentship verification and involve 3rd party (e.g. myself or volunteers) to mediate goods delivery and verification
• Allow users to tip and leave rating (1 to 5) to encourage good behavior

Accomplishments that we're proud of

none

Next step

• Implement user registration and form to create listings
• Private release to close friends

Built With

• cf-pages
• cf-workers
• go
• next.js