EcoLink Tech

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Inspiration

In a world of globalization, the logistics behind sourcing and manufacturing anything is extremely complex. This is especially true for electronics that have a massive climate impact as they travel around the world before being purchased. Shipping and transporting goods represents 3% (700 million MtCO2) of global GHG emissions. It was this logistical complexity and environmental impact that inspired us to undergo this project.

What it does

Our hack, helps the consumer visualize the journey that an electronic device takes from merely raw materials until it arrived at the point of purchase.

How we built it

The backend is coded using python with an API that connected to "cohere" to generate information about the manufacturing process for a device, and the raw materials that go into producing it.

The frontend is coded using react (js). Using an API we linked our frontend and backend. There are several files that work together to generate the website.

The map we created was generated using jVectorMap which allowed us to create a map displaying the countries that raw materials came from and manufacturing took place.

Challenges we ran into

1) Challenges with implementing cohere as an AI system 2) Challenges with implementing of the methods to map the journey of your electronic device. Since we wanted to create an interactive map that helped track the production cycle of an electronic, creating this proved to be quite difficult. 3) Struggling to code in more depth into our device list. To start we restricted our inputs to only Iphone and android. However, towards the end, we tried to add more devices to the list but faced struggles, in working around errors and other issues. One error we overcame, was the fact that any items not on the device list would crash the website.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

An achievement that we're proud of is our initial website page, front-end development was a comparative weakness, but we're really proud of how the graphics and UI of the website turned out. Another achievement we're proud of is the creation of the map that helps track the progress of the production cycle for an electronic device.