Plogg Club

Community Map
Cleanup Points
Saved Route
Global Cleanup Feed
Points Exchange

Inspiration

We were inspired by apps like Strava that take an arduous task like running and make it fun! We also wanted to create an app that encourages people to take care of the environment. You may be wondering about the name, though. That was inspired by a Swedish trend called Plogging, which is the practice of jogging or walking while picking up litter!

What it does

Plogg Club acts as an eco-friendly companion to your outdoor adventures! If you see an area with lots of trash while you're out and about, you can take a photo of the trash and upload it to a community map. Other users can then pick up the trash and earn points.

If you want to track how much trash you find on a walk or jog, you can record a route! The path and time of the route will be saved for future reference, along with the locations and severity of trash along the route. If you ever want to earn some extra points, you can re-trace the routes with the most trash!

Points have been mentioned a few times. They can be exchanged for gift cards from companies that sponsor Plogg Club, and in turn sponsor the cleanliness of our environment! Points can be earned by cleaning up marked trash sites; just take a before and after photo of the site, and an algorithm will decide how many points to award.

Points are more than a currency, however; they're also the mark of a dedicated Plogger. A global leaderboard displays the Ploggers with the most points. No one said taking care of the environment can't be competitive.

Finally, Plogg Club is a social app at heart. You can find your friends, view their stats, and go plogging together!

How we built it

We built this on caffeine and prayers.

Challenges we ran into

We faced challenges when developing the Plogg Club mobile app. At first, we tried to make it a native mobile app so it could use platform-specific features. However, that quickly became too much to maintain. We had to scrap the mobile features before reintroducing them with Capacitor as a web wrapper. However, the result turned out nicely.

Another challenge we faced was getting the routes feature to smoothly track users. At first, the recorded routes weren't mirroring the user's actual movement. However, we managed to debug it with a lot of effort.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the variety, quality, and fun-ness of the features we were able to implement. We especially like the route-tracking feature and the points system. It's exciting to pick up trash without knowing how many points the algorithm will give you. We're also proud of the mobile app; mobile apps will never not be cool.

What we learned

We learned that we're capable of designing and implementing a fun, functional, stylish product in only 36 hours. We're excited to raise the stakes even hire next time. We also got more familiar with tools like Claude Code and Conductor.

What's next for Plogg Club

We plan to add an events system so that communities can coordinate trash pickup events. We also thought it would be fun to add random events as encouragement for people to clean up less-travelled areas for more points. Finally, we played around with the idea of having a trash Pokédex; that might be a bit much, though.