WasteLess

Inspiration

Every year, approximately 1⁄3 of food products, which equals around $1 trillion, ends up as food waste in the landfills. According to The Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, less than half of the participants could tell the difference between the “best before” and the “use by” date. What connection can we make between these two? After thorough reflection, we concluded that the lack of education about the difference between the “best-before” and expiration or the "use by'' date labels is a major factor contributing to the tremendous amount of food waste. We believe that educating people on the difference between these two will help reduce food waste significantly. As a group of 4 university students in different disciplines, we focused on making this learning experience engaging, creative and fun!

What it does

Our application WasteLess allows users to keep track of the expiry dates. As the expiry dates approach, the app sends notification to user. The app provides a list of recipes to encourage users to consume the soon-to-be expired item. Not only that, it allows users to interact with their friends. Users can compare their own Fridge with their friends’, and request to cook collaboratively using the chat feature. The app also encourages users to donate food to the nearby charity institutions.

All in all, WasteLess provides sustainable solutions to the current increase in food waste. While fostering collaboration among close friends, WasteLess aims to maximize learning efficiency through collective learning.

How we built it

We designed our prototype using Figma and implemented the front-end using html and css. In doing so, we also used Bootstrap library which enabled us to build features simpler.

Challenges we ran into

Time management: We never realized 24h could be this short!
Assigning equal amount of task to each other
Implementing barcode feature which inputs the expiry date and the “best before” date automatically. We had a hard time decoding the actual barcode using the python pyzbar library.
Implementing the login feature using firebase authentication.
Implementing the chat feature using Twilio.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It was an opportunity for all of us to look into how much food is being wasted and reflect on our own habits that might have been a contributing factor to the increase in global food waste. We are proud that we were able to come up with a creative solution that impact. Being able to design our prototype and implement it using html and css Although it was the first coding Hackathon for most members of our group, we are proud that we were able to come up with a decent prototype.

What we learned

Working on this project made us realize that sometimes, a better strategy is to use what we already know rather than learning a new technology in a short period of time.
We learned how to structure a prototype using figma, html, and css