Inspiration
The inspiration was the second talk in the bigRedHacks event where the speaker told us how a sustainable solution needs to be economically and socially viable. This made us think why would people care about environment if it doesn't provide any instant gratification?
What it does
The idea is to build a universal system which creates a public environment profile which can be viewed by all. This will make people more responsible(because now they have a reputation to maintain). The profile will have a carbon credit score which is calculated based on multiple carbon emission metrics. These scores will be redeemable at your nearest store!
How we built it
To calculate the credit score, we allow users to upload an image, the image can be of food/public-transport tickets/clothing choices. The application processes this image to find out how different constituents(food ingredients/clothing brands) of it affect the environment and assigns a score.
Challenges we ran into
We had problems with the image recognition libraries as they weren't specifically trained on food images, so there where/are multiple mis-classifications. It was also difficult to find an aggregated carbon emission data for various crops.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're really proud of creating an "almost" complete web-service, with fully function front-end and back-end (separately) in 24 hours. We also believe that this something that bring a positive change in the world and its very relevant in the current environment (real and political!). We're so excited about finding a way by which not only oil companies but individuals could also be blamed (people with low reputation) for environmental depredations.
What we learned
First, we learnt how even certain crops can affect the environment. We learnt, how minor changes can have strong impacts; for example we found carbon emission for tea-bags is way higher. On the technical side, we leaned about different image recognition models available and the speed vs accuracy trade-offs. This was wholesome experience where we gained some domain and technical knowledge.
What's next for CarbonScore
There is much to do in the future, the key foucuses would be:
Rather than uploading old images, you could take picture of your food on your plate and the application would be able to assign a carbon credit score. This will need better image recognition too.
Building the public-transport and clothing-brand feature
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