Share Market

Inspiration

Looking at the world around us, we see that there is waste being produced everywhere. Whether that be food, older products, or items that are being replaced, 4.9 pounds of trash per person every day are being thrown into landfills and dumpsters. J40% of food alone are being wasted in America everyday. We wanted to build a website that focuses on fostering a sense of community when it comes to reducing waste. Whether that be offering extra food to share with your neighbors or giving away older clothes that have been grown out of size, we wanted to find a way to reduce perfectly fine products from being thrown away.

What it does

Our website allows users to register and login with email and password credentials. Then, they can make posts with a title and description of what they want to give away to other people in a close proximity to them. We use geo location and a search filter for people in close proximity to view and get goods and products that would otherwise be thrown away. Users can update and delete their posts as needed as well. Our project is focused on the sustainability track to help users in local communities start living more sustainable one step at a time

How we built it

We build this website using React as the front end, Node as the backend and MongoDB as our database. We use bcrypt to hash passwords for security purposes. We also used the library Bulma for convenient css.

Challenges we ran into

It was difficult for us to connect the front end and back end. Each use had to have a page to create and modify their own postings, as well as a separate page to view the posts of others. It was also difficult to make MongoDB fetch information and have that corresponding information show up on the front end as well.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to change things on the fly and use tech stacks that were foreign to us and learn many things about front and back end developments.

What we learned

We learned a lot about working together using git and making sure that front and back end can connect.

What's next for Share Market

We hope to release our website for use for local communities, whether that be neighborhoods, organizations, or just people in a close proximity to start reducing waste one small step at a time.