WaterWatcher

Inspiration

Water is scarce in many countries and we wanted to educate people of the large amounts of water that seemingly innocuous goods use.

What it does

Our app has a large database of foods and consumer goods that use different quantities of water in their production and transport. You can enter any desired quantity of an item and the app will procure a score (lower is better) for the impact of the item, especially on water-scarce countries. It will also give you a breakdown of the blue (groundwater and runoff), green (precipitation), and grey (needed to clean waste products) water required to produce each good.

How we built it

We took survey data from multiple sources and we parsed the data using python scripts. The data included water scarcity data for all countries, the amount of water required to produce a good (blue, green, and grey), and the relative share of production by good by country. We wrote an app that allowed a user to find an item and see its impact based on its quantity and type and display vital water statistics about it.

Challenges we ran into

There was a lot of data so it was parsed slowly. The data was scattered so we had to find it and combine it. Additionally, some of the data was very difficult to find. Adding the data to the app was problematic because they were in so many different data formats.