Evolving trends. Cheap clothing. Fast fashion.
As fashionable as our generation has become, we have been facing a greater concern for the issue of clothing waste. Did you know that North Americans toss out ~10 million tonnes of clothes every year—95% of which can be reused or recycled? That's around 37kg per person on average, annually!
We have recognized the concerns for clothing waste as a rising issue and decided to approach this problem with an interactive application that allows users to help our community and our Earth simultaneously—just with a simple post.
Our application allows users to upload any piece of clothing they do not need, which others can claim via an 'explore' page. Think of it like a virtual thrifting system—you post, and they take. We also have a 'maps' page, where locations of nearby donation bins are pinned. With multiple methods that are integrated into our application, users can choose their most convenient method to help our Earth.
Each post consists of details regarding the user and the clothing item: a photo, type of clothing, size, brand, how far the clothing item is located, gender (Male/Female/Unisex), and caption. This allows other users to easily browse through their options.
Our application is created with React Native on the frontend, Node.js and Express.js for the backend, and MySQL for the database.
Our biggest challenge was integrating the backend with the frontend, where we store all of our user and clothing information in a database.
Waste Down is intended to be a community platform that supports a wide variety of users. We wish to implement more features like chat/direct messaging feature, map's route finder, and a fast search algorithm. The sky's the limit.