The Green Path

Inspiration

Psychology studies have shown that showing your neighbors' electricity usage on your electricity bill motivates you to lower your own electricity usage. Peer pressure through knowing that your neighbor uses less electricity than you is a stronger motivator than environmental concerns or even saving money.

What it does

The Green Path tracks users' utility usage and compares this to the state and national average so that users are motivated to lower their monthly energy/water consumption. Through a built-in reward system where users earn badges based on their performance (i.e. 3-month streak of staying below average, a monetary rebate program for users earning 5+ badges), we incentivize users to lower the impact of their carbon footprints. The Green Path team will also plant a tree for every badge that each user earns to show our dedication to promoting a greener future. Based on members’ usage, The Green Path provides recommendations for users to integrate better habits into their lifestyle choices.

How we built it

We initially tried building the website using HTML/CSS but realized very quickly that these languages are not powerful enough to meet our demands for a dynamic website. We switched over to using JS and the React library, and utilized the Semantic UI system to make for cleaner code and enhanced functions. We created a variety of components and just imported all those files into the app.js file so that the code was more readable.

Challenges we ran into

One of the largest challenges we ran into was setting up the user input so that it updated the bar graph instantly; this challenge was overcame by changing the file hierarchy so that functions could be passed between the graph and bill components.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our vision for how The Green Path can positively impact the environmental sector, and what we've created so far. We are very proud that we were able to make a website from scratch using JS and React, when only one member had some familiarity with the library.

What we learned

We learned about how to see a project through from idea to finish (although we're not done yet). We also learned a lot about web development (CSS, JavaScript, HTML, React) and working as a team.

What's next for The Green Path

We would like the website to have the ability to get the utility bill of the user through scrapers to automate the tracking of the users' utility bills. We would also like to explore how The Green Path could be turned into a widget that can connect to smart meters in people's homes and technologies like Google Home for a more detailed breakdown of how much is being used and where in order to use machine learning algorithms to provide more personalized suggestions for how to reduce utility consumption.