Nature's Choice

Landing screen
Example of sample query being made
Results with Nature Score
Example of sample query being made with another phone
Our back-end developer enjoying a snack

Inspiration

We came into this hackathon knowing we wanted to make our project in sustainability. We all come from a very sustainable-focused lifestyle, whether it be tree planting in India, volunteering for recycling centers in Africa or working for the natural resources sector of the government. However, we all face problems between choosing between any two given choices when we're shopping. You hear all about how much big companies pollute the Earth and by voting with your dollar, you can do your small, yet meaningful, part to help the Earth.

What it does

Nature's Choice is a webpage application which allows the user to take a picture of any item they're thinking of purchasing or have already purchased, and our app will work in the background to find the Nature scores of these brands and the parent companies which own them to inform the user of how sustainable their purchase will be.

How we built it

Our frontend and backend is made using Taipy, which allows our app to breathe as one tightly integrated unit. Taipy helped us minimize the time we need to switch focus from frontend to backend and vice versa and allowed us to approach both aspects of our app at once. We also used MongoDB and openAI to handle the API calls that the backend and frontend of our website makes. The picture that the user takes gets processed by openAI to decipher what exactly we are looking at, and then we query our MongoDB database to find our stored Nature scores for any certain parent company who owns that product. This information is then showcased to the user, so they can make the informed choice they deserve to make.

Challenges we ran into

Finding databases for ESG scores for companies turned out to be a lot harder than we thought, because we accidentally sailed into the realms of the data-hungry finance bros. To access any sort of data regarding the sustainability of different companies would've been a split cost of a cool $2,000 between the three of us. We, sadly, are just not built like that. We had to power through by making informed machine learning models regarding previous historical data between multiple ESG score providers, and making our own unique Nature score which we use as the relative scale to compare companies.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that fundamentally, our program has a use. It has some sort of utility, which we deem to be important. We think helping people make sustainable choices is important, liberating information to give. We can let people make their own, informed decisions with as much knowledge as we can possible provide them. We believe this is powerful information to give to the people, and we're proud that we were able to do so for our hackathon project.

What we learned

We learned how to collaborate effectively with each other to create a full-stack app within 24 hours. This was a challenge for us, since none of us have gone on an adventure like this before. We have been to hackathons, but we all played smaller roles on our teams. This year, we wanted to make sure we were at the forefront of it all, and facing as many bugs and errors as possible so we could learn to navigate through them and help each other out to get this unified application up and going.

We also learned how to use Taipy, which we believe we will use a lot for our future projects. Taipy gives you a significant head start when it comes to creating an application, and it further helps smooth things along with it's ease of use and integration of front-end and back-end together.

What's next for Nature's Choice

The next steps for Nature's Choice will be going back into the depths of APIs to find and pick the ones that will help our app progress the most, such as a designated ESG scores API (something like the MSCI developer API or 2050) and integration with Google Lens to complement openAI in it's object recognition skills. We aim to make this data as free and open to as many people as possible, to help everyone in their path towards sustainability and caring for our future, together.