Inspiration
An alluring aroma might await you at the entrance of a fancy restaurant, but at the back of the restaurant, you will probably find rows of garbage cans filled with rotten food giving off fetid odors. Approximately 133 billion pounds of food amounting to about $162 billion is wasted by restaurants per year. Restaurants that use fresh produce daily often have to throw away food at the end of the day without ever using it. Instead of wasting so much food, restaurants can easily donate to help people in need. Wasted food also pollutes the environment by emitting methane, a gas that contributes significantly to global warming. To help people in need and to save the environment, we set out to create Waste Not.
What it Does
Our project takes wasted food from restaurants and other organizations and gives it to people in need of food. People can go to the donate section of the website and fill out a form that then comes up on the recieve section of the page. This allows donation centers, and such to see where extra food is located in times of need and be able to pick up the food with the address of the donators.
How We Built It
We built the frontend using Bootstrap, HTML, and CSS. We coded the backend using MongoDB and Nodejs. We first built the frontend of the website and set up routes using Nodejs. We were then able to store data from the donate page into a database and use that data to display our results on the recieve page.
Challenges we ran into
A big challenge we ran into was the database behind the backend of the project. We tried to code the received page but we had a lot of trouble storing it into the database. The MongoDB cluster wasn’t functioning properly so Mukul had to run the program that automatically whitelisted the local IP address when run
Accomplishments we’re proud of
An accomplishment we are very proud of is figuring out how to whitelist the local IP address so that it ran. Also, we were very proud of our UI because at first it looked terrible, but we made numerous changes to make sure that it looks neat and professional.
What we learned
All of us entered this competition with no knowledge of NoSQL databases and over the last 2 and a half days, we learned how to store data without having to worry about the data structures by relying on collections and documents rather than rows and tables as in relational databases.
What’s next for Waste Not
We would like to integrate the available donations into a map that shows where extra food is. We would also like to create an authentication system for our website, especially so we can make sure people in need are getting the extra food. Lastly, we want to create a way to check if the people donating are a reliable source.
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