weCAN

• 

  Better, together

Inspiration

I had always noticed the little "refund where applicable" fine print, but never knew about anyone who actually took them to the recycling depots, so while I was still team-less before ellehacks, I was thinking about things that I personally feel passionate about. I had also recently watched a video about plastic pollution in the oceans, which released some pretty strong emotions as I personally avoid consuming bottled water as much as I can.

After forming the teams for the hackathon and brainstorming ideas (one of the questions we asked out loud was "what kinds of problems do we see in the world/with ourselves that we would like to tackle?"

I had looked into recycling depots in downtown Toronto when I first noticed the fine print on the containers, but never thought to look beyond just downtown Toronto, so finding out that there are such depots available in the GTA (after the project planning was well underway) made me feel a little more reassured and made the problem seem more plausible as we tackled the problem.

What it does

It connects consumers (esp those who drink out of plastic bottles, tetra pak juice boxes, and aluminum cans) to recycling depots around the city - that maybe with the help of companies in the sharing economy market (i.e. Uber, and Lyft), or simply the consumers themselves.

Challenges we ran into

Most of the time was spent on trying to figure out which platform it would be best to program it on. Having a team split in half, with only two of us knowing how to program in HTML, CSS, and JS, and the other two having profound experience with Java was also a little tricky to deal with.

Task division was also a challenge, as different team members were sometimes working on different schedules (not all of us were sleeping over, and when we were all here, there were other activities happening that took some team time away)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Figuring out Proto.io and being able to create a demo in less than 5 hours. Pitching the idea to some of the folks from the sponsor companies and hearing good feedback!

What we learned

"How it feels to work on a project you are passionate about with roughly 2 hours of sleep in 48 hours" - Nishtha "Brainstorming is a big portion of time taken to build and design a project, which can take more time than one can imagine." - Asmeet "How to translate ideas into strategies and implement them." - Melanie "How to think like a business, and even though we did not have time to properly implement the ideas, it was a good experience." - Amanda

What's next for weCAN

The whole team is very excited about this idea and how detailed our planning process was, so we are planning on working on weCAN post ellehacks, potentially participating in future hackathons! Keep an eye out for weCAN, you just might be using it within the next 10 years to monetize your recyclables ;)