SUSEx

User Info

Inspiration

With the advent of COVID19 and fast fashion more people are buying clothes online than ever before. However, fast fashion and the faster loop of creating and discarding new clothing has a negative impact on the environment; Manufacturing clothes emits large amounts of carbon emissions, uses 5% of the world’s water. And discarding clothes made from certain materials adds to millions of tons to our land fills every year. In an effort to reduce our carbon and water footprints, SUSEx breaks down the environmental impact of your clothing purchases and gives you visibility into the impact of your actions on the environment over time and encourages you to track how you offset your footprint.

What it does

SUSEx is a platform that reminds people of how fast fashion could damage our planet, especially those that contain animal materials. Every time you purchase a clothing, we calculate carbon footprint, water waste, and land use. You can use our data dashboard to understand the trend of your purchasing pattern with our visualization. We encourage you to purchase products that report product description honestly. SUSEx also encourages you to reduce your carbon footprint by navigating you to a recycling store.

How we built it

We built our Chrome Extension to display environmental impacts. We created a React web dashboard to visualize data. We implemented the Serverless API server using Google Cloud Functions connected with Firestore using Firebase API. To host our dashboard, and store hazards we used Google Firebase.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into was that we could not communicate face to face, so we had to constantly create a second zoom meeting so that only two people were talking. Another challenge was that most of the products and technologies used were new to almost all of us and we leaned on the go, which brought up its own issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The accomplishment that we are the most proud of is that we finished this project within such a short time and we also learned a lot. We are also proud to have helped with the footprint-reduction movement.

What we learned

We learned how to use a lot of Google APIs and Google services, working with chrome extensions, the environmental impact of our purchases, working with teammates virtually. And, we learned that even though we did not have ramen contest, we could still have a good time.

What's next for SUSEx

In the future, SUSEx can work with environment scientists and organizations to promote and support to protect our plants for the next generation. In the future we would also look for more ways to track user impact over time as they purchase online.