This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass.
What I Built
🌱 Carbon Calculator App is a carbon footprint tracking application designed to help people understand their environmental impact and turn that awareness into meaningful action.
The idea behind the project is simple: understanding our carbon footprint should be the beginning of change, not the end of a calculation.
Carbon Calculator helps users estimate emissions from everyday activities, including transportation, household energy consumption, food choices, and waste management. It then presents visual insights and personalized recommendations to help users identify practical opportunities to reduce their environmental impact.
Key Features
🧮 Carbon Footprint Calculator
Users can track their daily activities across four categories:
- Transportation: cars, public transportation, flights, walking, and cycling.
- Energy: electricity, heating, and cooling.
- Food: meat, dairy, vegetables, and processed food.
- Waste: recycling, landfill, and composting.
📊 Environmental Insights and Analytics
Interactive charts help users understand their emissions by category and track daily, weekly, and monthly trends. The application also supports PDF and CSV report generation.
🤖 AI-Powered Recommendations
The application uses AI to generate personalized suggestions based on users' activities and carbon footprint data. Recommendations are organized by difficulty and include estimated carbon reduction potential.
✅ Action Plans and Progress Tracking
Users can turn recommendations into actionable tasks, organize them by priority, and track their progress over time.
🏆 Gamification and Social Sharing
Eco points, achievements, badges, and shareable environmental infographics encourage users to reflect on their progress and inspire others to adopt more sustainable habits.
How It Connects to Touch Grass 🌿
The Touch Grass theme is about using AI to encourage people to experience more of the real world.
Carbon Calculator approaches this through everyday environmental decisions.
Instead of simply displaying a carbon footprint score, the application can help users identify concrete actions they can take outside their screens:
- Walk or cycle for suitable short-distance trips.
- Choose public transportation when practical.
- Spend time walking in a park or exploring a nearby green space.
- Reduce food waste and make more thoughtful food choices.
- Practice recycling and responsible waste disposal.
- Track completed actions and reflect on their environmental impact.
The goal is to make the digital experience short and purposeful: understand the impact, choose an action, and go do it.
The application is intended to help users connect environmental awareness with practical changes in their daily lives.
Demo
🌐 Live Application: Carbon Calculator App
🎥 Video Demonstration: Watch the demo on YouTube
Code
GitHub Repository: [Add your public GitHub repository URL here]
The repository contains the source code, application architecture, and setup instructions needed to explore the project.
How I Built It
Carbon Calculator is built with Next.js and includes interactive data visualizations, carbon footprint calculations, AI-powered recommendations, task management, and social sharing features.
The main components include:
- Next.js: Application structure and user interface.
- Chart.js: Carbon footprint visualizations and historical trends.
- Canvas API: Generation of shareable environmental infographics.
- AI integration: Personalized sustainability recommendations.
- Reporting tools: Exportable PDF and CSV reports.
The existing AI integration uses Google Gemini. To align the project with the open-source AI challenge, I am focusing on incorporating an open-weight model into the core recommendation workflow.
An open-weight model such as Gemma can provide an alternative for generating practical sustainability recommendations. The model can be evaluated against the existing approach for relevance, response quality, latency, and deployment flexibility.
The objective is to make the AI component more adaptable rather than tying the application's entire recommendation experience to a single proprietary provider.
Why Does Open Innovation Matter?
Climate action is a shared challenge, and the tools we build to support it should be accessible, adaptable, and transparent.
Open innovation offers several important opportunities for Carbon Calculator.
1. More control over AI
Using an open-weight model makes it possible to experiment with different models, customize prompts, and adapt recommendation behavior to specific sustainability use cases.
2. Greater flexibility in deployment
Depending on the model and runtime, recommendations can potentially run locally or on infrastructure selected by the developer. This creates opportunities to reduce dependence on a single external AI provider.
3. Privacy-conscious design
Carbon footprint tracking can reveal aspects of a person's daily routine, including transportation choices, food consumption, and household energy use. An architecture that supports local inference can help minimize the need to send personal activity data to an external AI service.
4. Opportunities for experimentation
An open AI stack allows developers and contributors to compare model performance, improve recommendation quality, and experiment with new ways to encourage sustainable behavior.
5. Technology with a real-world purpose
The most important part of this project is not the model itself. It is what the model helps people do.
AI should help users understand their environmental impact and identify practical next steps. The ultimate goal is to turn insights into real-world habits, not simply generate more content for people to consume on their screens.
Open innovation makes it easier to explore different ways to achieve that goal and share improvements with the wider developer community.
Final Thoughts
Carbon Calculator started with a simple question:
What if understanding our carbon footprint became the first step toward changing it?
By combining carbon tracking, AI-powered recommendations, and actionable goals, the project aims to make sustainability easier to understand and practice.
Technology can help us make better decisions, but meaningful environmental progress happens when we take those decisions into the real world.
Sometimes, the best thing an AI application can do is help us put our phones away and take the next step outside. 🌍🌱
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