Who says we can't fight climate change from home?
This is my hackathon project for the Eco Hacks hackathon. The theme of the hackathon was finding novel and impactful ways to apply technology to climate change and crisises. For this I decided to address the carbon emissions caused by housing. In the US, housing makes up over one eighth of the total green house emissions produced. The main sources of emissions in housing come from electricity used for actions such as heating and cooling as well as general waste.
There are a lot of things that we can do to lessen the amount of electricity we consume and waste we produce. This is my attempt to show people areas they need to address and inform them how to do so. I focused on mostly low cost items to tackle that are inclusive to people of all ages, social and economic situations. Often times the barrier to entry of big ticket purchases causes inaction, and I wanted to fix this by choosing smaller more obtainable ways to make an impact. Big solutions come from many small actions, and I'm hoping that this app will help spur many people.
What is this app? This app is a quiz app that allows users to get feedback on how green their home and home habits are. Along with getting a rating of how they are doing, the app offers information and tips for areas that may have been lacking as well as organizations they can help. The goal is to bring awareness of good habits to build for each user who takes this quiz.
For this app I used React with styled-components to build the front end. I deployed using Github Pages. I thought about adding a Node backend, but there was no reason to spin up a server if I didn't plan to persist the quiz results or serve more than a simple SPA.
One of my main goals, beyond informing, with this app was to create something that is very easy to share. Some of the things I've done to allow for this are:
- Created a button that allows users to with a click of a button to copy the url to their clipboard.
- Made the link and thumbnail visually appealing to make users feel safer about sharing and opening it.
- Focused on a short list of universally applicable and impactful behaviors to change.