Inspiration: Plenty of people go vegan to minimize the impact of their meals on the environment. As we all know, the production of meat and fast food is overwhelmingly detrimental to the earth, in many ways more than one.
But what if we told you that many substitutes aren’t as ‘friendly’ as many people think? What if we told you that chicken requires 518 gallons of water per pound, but lentils require even more (704 gallons per pound, to be exact)? And that one glass of almond milk requires 74 litres of water to be produced?
Changing your entire diet to cut out meat is not always the best solution and may simply be unfeasible for many people. This is why we thought that a better solution would be to eat smart by reducing (but not necessarily cutting out) ingredients that are taxing for the environment, and to be educated on which types of ingredients are better for these purposes.
What it does: This calculator will take into consideration exactly how much of Earth’s resources went into making your meal: the amount of water used, the amount of carbon emitted into the atmosphere, and the land area used to produce the ingredients. This calculator will enable you to see your direct impact on the Earth meal by meal, and allow you to choose smart alternatives. Our goal is to encourage sustainable eating by picking local ingredients that require minimal resources to produce.
Users will be able to input the ingredients from their meal with their respective amounts in grams, and the calculator will output the carbon emissions for each ingredient, as well as the total carbon emission of the meal. We hope that calculating the environmental cost of meals will encourage people to make informed decisions concerning the environment.
How we built it: All of the graphics and backgrounds on the landing page were drawn by hand on Procreate, and the layout of the page was designed using Figma. This design was then transferred onto the site using HTML and CSS.
The calculator component of this project was also made using HTML and CSS, as well as JavaScript. We used a database found on Our World in Data.
Challenges we ran into: We were initially hoping to build the landing page using HTML, CSS, and Sass, and also we hoped to make the page responsive. This proved unreasonable given the time constraints, but we wish to work on this further once SheHacks is finished.
On the calculator page, we found it difficult to improve the .csv file and parse it into usable data forms (we tried doing 2D array and dictionary by using jQuery). However, due to lack of time, we decided to hardcode the data and focus more on the functionality of the calculator.
Another difficulty we found was hosting our website using domain.com. The free website builder was not accessible thus we decided to use glitch.com, a code editor to display our project.
Accomplishments that we’re proud of: One of our accomplishments was getting the calculator page to work, because it was our first time using JavaScript, and we had to learn, research and problem-solve along the way. We were also happy with the landing page, since we created all of the graphics from scratch.
What we learned: We learned how to use new coding and markup languages such as HTML, CSS and Javascript. We learned how to use GitHub to work on projects in collaboration.
What’s next for Calc-u-eater: Some of our next steps include: Incorporating more databases to increase the amount of ingredient options Include nutritional values into consideration when calculating final meal score Making the website responsive and scalable Using databases to create a login system for different users Making a leaderboard and achievement badges for users to unlock