💡 Inspiration
Climate change is already affecting the entire world, with extreme weather conditions such as drought, heatwaves, heavy rain, floods and landslides becoming more frequent, including in India. Other consequences of the rapidly changing climate include rising sea levels, ocean acidification and loss of biodiversity. In order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius – a threshold the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) suggests is safe – carbon neutrality by the mid-21st century is essential.
🤔 What is carbon neutrality? Carbon neutrality means having a balance between emitting carbon and absorbing carbon from the atmosphere in carbon sinks.
There are two types of solutions to this problem: first is to reduce CO2 emission which actually takes practice by all of us, the other is to absorb CO2 emissions. According to researchers planting trees is the most effective and cheapest way to pass this. Well, we as a human would not prioritize investing time or money and going through all the ruckus of finding locations to plant trees, gather all the materials and step ahead. Here, comes rePlant to help you step forward in achieving carbon neutrality and encouraging others as well.
🌳 What it does
rePlant is a product solution that centres people willing to plant trees along with us on locations added by rePlant team and planters themselves as well. A user has several options once he is on with us on the journey, he/she can choose if he/she is willing to plant a tree themselves on some marked location nearby or if they want the rePlant team to plant a tree for them on their name at a very minimal cost. Once a tree is planted by the planters name, a post can be added and shared with fellow planters and on social handles encouraging others in the circle to step ahead for the same and beat their trees planted total score and join in the amazing journey with rePlant.
💻 How I built it
- The android mobile application was built using Java and Google APIs for quick development.
- For the Machine Learning part, I used the Entity extraction API for recognizing the address of the planting address within the static added text address. Once the address has been identified, one can navigate directly to it.
- For maps visualisation and marking Google Maps API was used.
- Used stripe payment gateway API for making payments.
- Android Studio was used to build the whole application smoothly.
😲 Challenges I ran into
- The project idea is wide enough, deciding on the flow, building the application and also thinking of it as a startup idea required a great deal of endurance, brainstorming and effort. But the challenges were interesting enough for making me learn some amazing new stuff. 😁
🥳 Accomplishments that I'm proud of
- As an individual, entering the hackathon in the end, gearing up myself for some new challenges and making a complete base application for rePlant in this some time seemed impossible, but I did it! ✨
- Implemented many new things in the application and they worked well!!
- I'm making a step ahead with rePlant to bring about a change in the world.
🙋♀️ What I learned
- Machine Learning can be applied in many ways, ways we can't even think of.
- How to work and build upon a project idea under stringent deadlines.
- Also, we must be the change we wish to see in the world.
😍 What's next for rePlant - Each one, plant one (coming up for sure!)
- Planters will be able to plant more than 1 tree at a particular purchase.
- Navigating to a particular location will be made easier.
- Integrating earthcoin into rePlant system.
- Integration of more types of payment gateways.
- Price per plant might increase, but giving special discounts to planters on each planting they do.
- Scoring system for the planters to build up targets and competition on who plants more.
- Start a movement with all planters and team rePlant to achieve the goal.
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