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Inspiration
Showing up to our HooHackathon our teammate Sherry had good news that her family in Hawaii was safe despite the record breaking flooding tearing its way across the island. This small relief still begged the question among us, could our team create an idea truly able impact a seemingly far too inevitable climate change. After identifying that up to https://ourworldindata.org/greenhouse-gas-emissions-food, our team brainstormed on how to minimize this damage.
What it does
We created a solution for the environmentally focused consumer who wants to make an impact on their daily carbon footprint through their most essential need: food. Our product allows consumers to identify more environmentally friendly recipes from wherever they happen to be around the world.
CarbonCrumb lets users track the carbon, water, land, and biodiversity impact of their food and receive nutritious, sustainable recipe alternatives in 10–30 minutes. Using environmental data, the app calculates an emissions score for inputted foods and suggests swaps that meaningfully reduce a user's footprint. A global tab lets adventurous users explore sustainable dishes from countries around the world. Recipes are personalized to dietary restrictions, cooking skill, and available time. CarbonCrumb also addresses a common gap in women's nutrition. Because high-carbon foods like red meat are often sought for their iron content during menstruation, the app highlights accessible plant-based alternatives that meet the same nutritional needs.
How we built it
We built this project as a web application. For the frontend, we used React along with Typescript. We also used WebGL Earth for globe rendering. We built the backend in Python and used the Flask web server package to communicate with the frontend web page. Finally, we used an SQLite database to store information on recipes.
Challenges we ran into
One of the biggest challenges we faced was integration hell. Most of our team members ended up on divergent parts of the project (i.e. frontend/backend), so it took some time at the end to integrate the two. Another challenge we faced was finding suitable high iron alternatives to support those who need more iron in their diet such as people suffering from anemia or periods. The final major challenge we faced was a difference in experience between some of our team members. We got around this by providing mentorship to the beginner hacker by the more experienced team members.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are particularly proud of the styling and design of the website. The different elements on the frontend come together in a way that is both easy to use and nice to look at (in our opinion). We are also proud of the globe page, with an interactive globe that can be clicked on to see recipes from a specific country. Finally, last but not least, we are proud of building a project that helps alleviate an issue close to us, sustainability and the environment.
What we learned
Creating CarbonCrumb at one point or another had every team member outside their comfort zone. More experienced teammates taught the less experienced, and the team had hands on practice using React. The team tackled the challenge of integrating a WebGL Earth visualization, an SQLite database, and a Python backend powered by Flask to bringing together a variety of technologies from our various skillsets.
What's next for CarbonCrumb
The next step for CarbonCrumb is to build a mobile app to complement our web app. That way users will be able to manage their environmental impact whenever they have their phone on them. Another next step will be to add in even more recipes. We have a decent section of recipes at the moment, but with more time we could expand our database to more recipes spread across more cuisines.
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