Treeder

Inspiration

Climate Change is the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating.

Leonardo Decaprio

Climate change and global warming are some of the biggest threats that our planet faces today. The potential future effects of global climate change include more frequent wildfires, longer periods of drought in some regions, and an increase in the number, duration, and intensity of tropical storms. However, we believe that these problems are a direct consequence of humans living recklessly. The need of the hour is frugality, and every human being has to make an effort to make their contribution in reversing the damage.

The world has enough for everyone's needs, but not everyone's greed.

Mahatma Gandhi

Ideally, humans should be generous and share what they have in excess. The world has enough resources for everyone to live reasonably, but not impulsively. These are the core principles behind our idea - Treeder.

What it does

Treeder is a mobile application that focuses on giving its users a sense of their carbon footprint. It can tell you how much carbon your food is emitting, track all the trees you've planted and suggest methods to reduce your contribution to carbon emissions in everyday life. If you feel like you have too much food than needed to go around, Treeder also shows you homeless shelters nearby, that you can donate your food to. It will help you tackle your carbon emission as well as feed another soul. Treeder encourages its users to be frugal, donate extra food, and lead a healthy "low-carbon" life.

How we built it

The Android app has been built using Kotlin and Android Studio. The UI has been done on Figma. The locations of the trees and the shelters have been incorporated using the Google Maps API. The backend has been developed using Django and the Django-REST-Framework. An API has been created and hosted on Heroku.

Challenges we ran into

We wanted to implement a model that could predict the carbon emission of food with just a picture. That would have greatly boosted the ease with which users could use the project, but due to implementation errors, we had to switch to text input for the carbon emission calculation.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We successfully integrated Google Maps onto our app, which makes it very easy to track the trees you've planted all around the planet, as well as find homeless shelters nearby within a 5-mile radius that you can donate your food at.

What we learned

This is our first time with the Google Maps API and working with geolocations on the backend as well. We have been able to configure it within our code and deploy it successfully without errors.