vessel

Inspiration

The rising emissions of greenhouse gasses has driven earth to an uncofortable state of climate change. Our new app vessel aims to use the power of composting to reduce greeenhouse gasses and put carbon back into the ground. About one forth of American waste is organic material that can be composted yet only eight percent of people use compost. Compost is the key to sustainable agriculture due to its properties with water retention, waste reduction, and soil health.

Many lack the resources to compost their scraps, setting up a personal pile takes time and effort and few cities have municipal compost collection. With the vessel app, users will be able to effortlessly make money from disposing their scraps responsibly.

What it does

The landing page gives users the ability to drop their compost at one of vessel's drop-off locations. Each of the company's drop-off locations will consist of a recycled shipping container split into three different compartments for different stages in the composting process. When the user deposits their waste, an automated system will weight the scraps and then add it to the compost pile. The vessel will then scan an in-app QR code so the user can be reimbured with points.

The points given to users can either be withdrawn for money or used to buy vessel brand compost or gear such as a compost bin to aid transportation, etc. This money comes from the revenue of the finished compost. With organic compost selling at nearly ten cents per pound, the vessel compost can will make enough money to incentivise each user to turn their trash into treasure.

What is a vessel?

A vessel is a drop off point for compost. A vessel is a modified old shipping container. This will save the container from landfill, while also offering a cheap and solid recepticle for the compost.

The vessel will then be modified by splitting it into two boxes on the inside (by putting a metal wall halfway through the container) such that there can be two seperate compost piles at the same time. By allowing 2 different states of compost, one can be closed at all times allowing it to go through the necessary waiting period for the pile to properly compost. Once its done composting, the compost will be taken from the vessel, that box will be opened and the other box will close to allow it to compost.

Each vessel will also need to have some smart technology. It will need to weigh the compost to give proper rewards, be able to scan QR codes to give rewards (or generate non-fungible informational QR codes with weight of compost, location, etc). Additionally, we hope that it can read temperature information which aids in observing the compost state.

How we built it

We used Flask to build a simple web app as a proof of concept, but to actually build the app, we would need to sink a lot more time into building the app. We used Figma to design what we think that the app could look like.

The app uses google maps to look for nearby vessels and map users to vessels.

Challenges we ran into

It's impossible to build, test and design a product of the scale that we are looking at while learning the technology to build it. A lot of time was spent learning Figma, Flask, and other technologies that took time away from us building the product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We believe that this is a unique solution to a huge problem. The ideation stage and product design stages went very well, and our team thinks that this is a viable, and creative solution

What we learned

We learned a lot of new technologies, but mainly, we learned how to work together, and for most it was the first time that we thought of a problem, and had to find a solution to that real world problem, rather than just coding the solution to a problem given to us.