Inspiration
Climate change is a problem that has been around since most of us were probably not even alive. There are more "solutions" to this problem than people can keep track of, but yet the problem still persists--not because the solutions are bad, but because they are simply too unrealistic to implement. Keeping this in mind, our group decided to tackle a specific subtopic in climate change: food waste. It is done by the billions in tons each year globally, and people don't even realize how harmful it is. To amend this ignorance, we created a website that allows people to dispose of their unwanted food appropriately while also making something out of it; it's a win-win situation.
What it does
The website mediates interactions between the user and the compost center, making it easy for the user to get in touch with a compost center and donate their scraps of food. The website employs a points based system, where points are allocated to the user per found of food donated, incentivizing people to donate their scraps of food. The points can then be redeemed for eco-friendly prizes such as an eco-friendly phone screen or laptop sleeve. What this does is it skips the tedious process of educating people about the problem(which they probably don't even care about in the first place), and instantly gets them to fix their ways. Moreover, the consumers are receiving "prizes" for their good deeds. At the end of the day, we are left with a good cause, and a satisfied customer.
How we built it
Our website is primarily built using HTML and CSS, with a little bit of JavaScript. We used some tutorials along the way to polish off our project, but the idea was conceived from our own personal experiences. The order and topic of the web pages themselves were inspired by what we have seen on other popular websites, like Amazon and Nike Store.
Challenges we ran into
We faced a huge challenge particularly about 7 hours into our project when we made a huge pivot. Our initial plan was to create a game, where the points won in it were going to be used on a tag-along website with the catalog only. However, mid way through making the game we realized that the game was too unrealistic to accomplish in 2 days, and on top of that it wasn't really fulfilling our purpose of solving climate change. Thus, we changed our plan and scrapped the game to make the website our primary product. From a game, we went to a mediator organization that connected consumers with the facilities they needed--in this case, trash composting.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are most proud of recognizing food waste as a cause of climate change, because most people overlook it. Oftentimes, when the idea of solving it is brought up, people think "get rid of plastics," or "stop using fossil fuels." Of course, those ideas aren't bad but it obviously isn't feasible to put a standstill to any vehicles/machinery that use fossil fuels. Food waste, on the other hand, is something any household, and person, no matter in what condition can help solve. Not only did we acknowledge the Capacity and Adaptation challenges of the entire competition, we also shed light on a big problem.
What we learned
Apart from technical skills, more importantly we learned a lot about the enormous problem that food waste really is. Billions of tons, larger than anyone can even begin to imagine, is wasted every single year and nobody does anything about it. The entire prospect of it is insanely depressing, but then again, that's why we made this website.
What's next for CompostTogether: Growing a Better Future
This project is intended to be used in the state of Massachusetts primarily, as that's where most of our partners reside. However, the best thing about it is that it can be scaled very easily. Once we gain the necessary scope, we can implement this in any state, and even any country. If this project is received well among the judges, our plan is to follow through this.
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