Plasticity

Risk Rater
Risk Rater
Home page

Inspiration

Microplastic is a newly trending term that refers to granular, broken down pieces of plastic. Not much is known about its long-term effects, and scientists speculate they can cause cancer and/or DNA damage. Thus, we made Plasticity as a means of identifying products that contain a high risk of plastic contamination for users.

What it does

Users can enter a product or general brand name. They are then returned with results regarding various products that rank the contamination likelihood. Users are also shown with statistics about microplastics to serve as an educational background as to why microplastics are a problem.

How we built it

We built this tool as a web application. For the backend, we employed Flask. For the frontend, we utilized Bootstrap, HTML, and CSS. We also utilized BeautifulSoup to dynamically scrape Incidecoder.com and rate those products using beatthemicrobead.org to classify the risk.

Challenges we ran into

Some of the scraping posed some problems, but we were able to stay resilient and piece together a solution that we are proud of!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to overcome technical hurdles, raise awareness to an environmental issue, and provide a service that is both meaningful and impactful.

What we learned

We learned a lot about plastic contamination and its adverse effects such as underlying diseases it can potentially cause. On the technical side we improved our knowledge of how to web scrape and styling with bootstrap.