WasteLess

Our mission is to focus on United Nations Goal 2, Zero Hunger and reduce the food amount wasted, in this case, particularly around campus

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Inspiration

Experience with dining hall food waste In our time here on campus, we would notice how when when we returned our dishes at dining halls, many plates would still have plenty of food in them. Not only that but the trashcans would have food leftovers as well. This inspired us to tackle food waste at dining halls around campus.

What it does

WasteLess aims to motivate students to lessen food waste by providing them with reward points, rebates, and other opportunities like volunteering and food donation locations to participate in.

How we built it

We focused on 3 main steps, them being 1: Brainstorming, 2: Research, and 3: Prototyping/Development

  1. Brainstorming We first identified the problem we wanted to tackle Form them on we brainstormed what we could design to make this happen Once we had a solid plan we worked on the overall design
  2. Logo
  3. Theme
  4. Extras (merch, mobile look)
  5. Research
  6. Created a survey to help see the effectiveness of our idea
  7. Looked into organizations with similar goals
  8. Used feedback from survey responses
  9. Prototyping Brainstormed ideas for the logo
  10. What key elements should the website include?
  11. What’s the overall purpose of our website? Why do we stand out?

Challenges we ran into

We originally planned on preventing waste through partnering with composting sites, but realized that it would be hard to implement the level of change we were looking for in a simple product. This meant we were back to the drawing board without much of a plan and 4 hours in. We pivoted to the idea of partnering with MSU’s culinary department, Eat At State, in order to reduce waste in the dining halls, an issue our group has all witnessed firsthand. We had to do a lot of troubleshooting, debugging and questioning of the core product when developing the web application version of Wasteless. We had trouble with the dimensions of our page, text wrapping around and making our website look somewhat professional. After hundreds of attempts of trial and error we were able to finally deploy the website.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Adopting and adapting each team member’s different areas and skills and turning it into an essential part of our idea, while working at a fast pace. Simultaneously, we were able to pivot ideas quickly to help to face the chosen issue. We’re proud of the progress that we’ve made in tackling food waste at MSU. Developing the WasteLess platform to identify key areas for food recovery on campus.

What we learned

We were able to learn valuable skills like time management, organization strategies, adapting to working with unfamiliar individuals in diverse areas, adapting ideas while keeping in mind the issue we’re addressing, approaching the data we collected/ researched as an integral part of the problem-solving process, and working under the pressure of a fast-paced project.

What's next for WasteLess

Looking ahead, WatseLess aims to expand its impact by partnering with colleges across the U.S, student organizations, and local food banks. We plan to refine our mobile platform, making it easier for students to track excess food, locate donation spots and to participate in waste programs.

-We would introduce an app for users to have easy access through their mobile devices

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