Namis

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  Namis Buy

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  Namis Sell

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  Green-Gatherers

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  Fulfilling an order

Inspiration

We were at the Bacchanal Buffet at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas on January 9th. After paying a hefty fine to enter ($87 each) we were surprised to find out we only had 90 minutes to gorge ourselves as much as possible. In the process of trying everything we could, we inevitably left a mountain of waste in our wake. With our bellies stuffed, we stared at the continent in front of us, naturally our gazes wandered to the surrounding tables which all looked the same. We then watched as our waiter dumped our food into the trash.

This was our first encounter where we started talking about the prevalence of food waste. Only a week later, on Martin Luther King day we worked as banquette hall servers at the Lansing Convention Center for the MLK Luncheon where we saw entire plates of untouched food thrown away table after table. That's when we witnessed with our own eyes the egregious problem of food waste in the United States.

What it does

Our suite of applications creates a system for managing this waste. It starts with users who have food waste to dispose of. Namis Sell allows these users to post their waste and associate it with a weight and category. Whether the user represents a business or is using the app residentially the post is visible to Namis Green-Gatherers through Namis Admin.

Green-Gatherers have a map of different waste sellers and buyers color-coded by category. They can then determine an optimal route to most efficiently deliver waste from sellers to buyers.

On Namis Buyer, businesses that specialize in any of our 4 categories can post an order specifying the weight, and category of the waste they need while setting their price for it. This allows Green-Gatherers to determine what buyers to sell to based on the availability of similar category sellers nearby and the price listed by the buyers.

To incentivize more users to post and sort their waste for proper recycling the Green-Gatherers can dedicate some of their profit to pay back those whom they gathered for.

How we built it

We built three apps to facilitate each role in our system. The Buy, Sell, and Green-Gatherer apps are all built in Swift. We utilize Apple Maps API to display buyer and seller locations. We utilize Firestore and document listeners from Firebase.

Challenges we ran into

We had some difficulty with our Xcode configurations that required some research and debugging. We also ran into some challenges using Apple's native location service.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the proof of work system we have created to make a better financial incentive for businesses to recycle food waste. By providing a way for businesses to profit off their waste and other businesses to reduce their costs of operations we hope to be able to provide a way for this system to come to fruition. We are also proud of the skills we have developed working with Firebase and Swift.

What we learned

We learned how to better use Swift, Xcode, Firebase, and the Apple Maps API. We also learned about many of the current challenges corresponding to food waste mitigation in the USA, and how other countries' systems are set up to be able to handle it.

What's next for Namis

Throughout this project we created a backlog of features we would like to add in the future:

• Date Created for seller listing (If over X days old status is set to spoiled)
  • Ensures drivers are getting fresh food.
• Use computer vision to ensure food meets category criterion
• Make guidelines more clear and categories more specific
• Flag poor actors (people who don't adhere to category guidelines)
• Show the total amount of money earned as a seller
• Add weight and price information to buyer nodes on the map, and weight info to seller nodes
• Allow drivers to generate a route based on the locations they are picking up waste from and based on their dropoff location

Built With

• apple
• firebase
• maps
• swift
• swiftui