Wastey

Inspiration

We often don't realise how much waste we make a week. If you think about how often you actually throw away half a loaf of bread, some leftover baked beans or a stale pastry? The small amounts of waste become food bin mountains. we don't actually consume how much we buy. we thought that tracking waste would be a good way to be more mindful of what you buy and what you waste? what's more triggering than a very alarming number to represent how much money you actually waste away every week.

What it does

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Add items from your recent shop and click submit.
As you go through the week enter items that you throw away to your waste page.
Wastey will continuously update your waste stats to let you know how much waste you're creating.
On your next shop, you'll have a list of items that you can now buy less.

How we built it

DAY 1 : We spent a lot of time brainstorming ideas that matched the theme of "circular economy", but also ideas that we could use in our everyday life.

DAY 2 : Started the morning by finalising our ideas. The hardest part was just choosing one idea. Then moved on to Crazy 8's and created a list of features that we could build within the time we had.

DAY 2.5 : After listing features by the priority we then started to build a quick prototype and the actual app. We decided to try next.js for the first time to make routing a little easier, alongside firebase for authentication, the database and hosting. We used basic colours in order to focus on features and functionality.

DAY 3 : The team worked in alternating pairs and individually in our own time. The first thing we did Sunday morning was to merge all our work together and outline the remaining tasks for the day. We worked on this presentation, created the DevPost account and continued building.

Challenges we ran into

Authentication
Using new tech always has a learning curve that we definitely didn't have enough time for.
Merge requests - a lot of code was done out of context so connecting it all up required everyone to mob.
Storing Data

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Proud of our idea
Creating a functioning app in 2.5 days
Used new technologies
Overcame bugs
Team work & work ethic despite busy lives

What we learned

Working with different knowledge levels & strengths
How to code and plan in a very short amount of time.
Configuring Babel to compile styled-components
Next.js
How to handle Next/link
Using image optimization with the new Next.js Image tag.

What's next for Wastey

We hope to develop the app more with features that we initially hoped to have.

With a more reliable MVP, we hope to start user testing to see the public response to the app.

Features we hope to develop on:

A tips page that recommends ways to be more sustainable.
Drag and drop items from the shopping list into the bin page.
A page that shows the food that wasn’t wasted, that can be carried on to the next week.
Connection to a recipes API that recommends receipts for your remaining items.