SmartWaste

   My sister, who's helping out here at Menlo Hacks, recently went to a school in Vermont called The Mountain School for a semester. At The Mountain School, she was taught a lot about the environment and climate change. When she came back she taught my family about what she learned. She told us about how food waste is one of the biggest contributors to climate change, probably the biggest issue facing humanity, and how we should really be more conscious of how much food we are throwing away. And that's when I had the idea for SmartWaste, the first app that monitors and keeps track of your food waste and calculates how it contributes to climate change. 

  The app allows you to upload meals throughout the day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, letting you select how much food was wasted and the different types of food. From that data, it will calculate the amount of greenhouse gasses your food waste will end up putting into the atmosphere. Once you've submitted meals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner you can upload the day's food waste to your 'calendar of meals' where it's placed alongside your accumulated food waste from other days for you to compare.

 I built SmartWaste using Swift and developer platform, XCode. My coding level is beginner-intermediate, only being an 8th grader and having 6 months of experience in Swift. Building SmartWaste was relatively a challenge because I had to use and implement data structures functions I had never heard of before. The biggest challenge I encountered was when I realized I didn't have enough time to use and set up a proper database so I had to research alternatives and eventually came upon a form of IOS data storage called NSData which provides data objects, or object-oriented wrappers for byte buffers. Learning how to use it was difficult but after reading a few articles and posts I finally overcame the challenge and got my app to store data.

The experience of building SmartWaste was a meaningful one because of everything I learned along the way. I am proud of how I faced the challenge of building SmartWaste and also how I managed to stay on task throughout the process despite the urging temptation to play video games with my friends. I believe SmartWaste is an application that can really have a meaningful impact on the world and in the future, and I will work to releasing it to the public so we can all help to save the planet together. 

Built With

• swift