WattNow
The Situation
E-waste generation worldwide has nearly doubled since 2010, from 33.8 million metric tons to roughly 62 million tons in 2022 (Statista). While most e-waste generation is done in wealthy countries, the environmental consequences of e-waste are disproportionately felt by poor countries (ScienceDirect).
At the same time, access to and literacy with digital technologies have become an increasingly mandatory part of modern life, although often the costs of these technologies make them inaccessible for low income people, exacerbating the disparities between income groups.
With our project, we want to address both of these issues, and to answer the question that many people ask themselves when they want to get rid of their old technology, "What now?"
Our Response
WattNow is an online platform where people can
- Get personalised guidance on how to safely and productively get rid of their unwanted technology
- List their unwanted technology on a community board for neighbors to claim
- Request technology on the community board for neighbors to supply, and
- Track the environmental and social impacts of their actions.
Our dev stack
UI mockups and presentation
- Figma
- Canva
Frontend
- Auth0 SDK
- React+Vite
- React-Router-Dom
- Axios
- Styled-Components
- Toastify
Backend
- Auth-0 Machine-to-Machine
- MongoDB/Mongoose
- Dotenv
- Express
- NodeJS
Looking back on our experience
We faced some challenges in the beginning — our original team spent a lot of time trying to come to an agreement on what kind of project we should work on, and ultimately we made the tough decision to split up. It was what was best for all of us, and we still remained friendly!
While developing WattNow we learned valuable lessons about communication, collaboration, and compromise, as well as not being afraid to reach out for outside help (shout out HackDavis mentors!).
We're proud of what we were able to accomplish in a short amount of time, from learning and implementing Auth0 to ultimately creating a project that we truly believe could create social good.
What's next for WattNow
- Building out personalised action recommendations (discard method + preparation)
- Implementing ML to suggest listing/request matches to users
- Sharing WattNow with the world!