Inspiration

We have learned through many different outlets that food insecurity is an issue that is affecting many students and community members. We know many people who struggle to pay for their daily meals and we are also aware of the leftovers in restaurants and dining halls being tossed out and going to waste. We have created this project to address both issues.

What it does

This project aims to recruit volunteers to get in contact with restaurant owners and dining hall workers to collect leftovers and distribute it to those in need. We will conduct periodic surveys on the student and city populations regarding food security as well as workers on the status of food waste.

How we built it

We used Flask as our main tool for server hosting. We worked with HTML and CSS files for formatting and displaying the UI and used Python for backend operations.

Challenges we ran into

In the beginning, our team effort was very disorganized and we ran into a lot of issues and merge conflicts. None of us knew web development stuff beforehand so we all had to learn it very fast.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Nearing the end of this event, we were able to join all our efforts together and get everything to work the way we wanted to. We were able to effectively split up tasks (two of us worked on the back end, one of us worked on the front end, and one of us worked on designing the webpage).

What we learned

Before this hackathon, we barely knew how to use Git as well as web development, but working on this project together has made us all much better at such tasks. We are now all comfortable with web development as well as with using Git to work on group projects.

What's next for Project Zero Waste

We plan on expanding our project in the future to include a better database for better security as well as further improving the website's layout to enhance user experience. In addition to our website, we also plan on eventually making an app with similar functionality to make it more convenient for people to access. We still need to learn more about the different tools to create such applications in order to implement our plans, but we will continue our work in the near future.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates