Penn State undergrads named hackathon finalists for sustainable fashion app

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A team of three Penn State College of Engineering undergraduate students recently competed in the Google Developer Group (GDG) on Campus hackathon and was selected as a “Top 10 Finalist” from the North America region.

JaeMin Birdsall, who graduated in May with a degree in computer science, Devin Myers, a rising junior majoring in computer engineering, and Leona Chen, a rising junior majoring in computer science in the College of Engineering and math in the Eberly College of Science, competed in the first round of the hackathon at Penn State in mid-April on the climate action challenge track with their app Rethread. The app aims to educate consumers about the environmental footprint of their clothingand provides information about how to donate, repair or resell clothes.

After competing in the April round of the hackathon at Penn State, the team advanced to a second round, where they submitted the next iteration of their project about a week later. The contest, which has been ongoing as the teams submit revisedversions of their projects and meet with mentors from Google, culminated in a final round over video call earlier this month.

“Placing Top 10 in North America was the moment it stopped feeling like a class project,” Myers said. “We were up against teams who had been building with different expertise, and our thing held up."

Chen said that the multiple rounds and ongoing feedback provided though the contest is a unique feature and one that she appreciates.

“I think the most exciting thing is the opportunity to continually refine our project,” she said. “A lot of hackathons just stop at that 24-hour mark, and not that many hackathons go in multiple rounds. With the multiple rounds, it's given us time to refine and turn what is a scrappy demo into something that could totally be a real thing.”

According to the team, to use the app, a person can take a photo of an article of clothing as well as its tag. The app then uses the Cloud Vision application programming interface (API), which is a connection between the app and backend software, and optical character recognition to determine the garment composition and the text on the tag. Next, it uses Google Gemini to analyze the garment’s environmental impact, CO2 and water usage based on factors including the fabric composition and the dyes and bleaches used for coloring it. It also pulls from Wikirate’s open Environment, Social and Government (ESG) database, which contains data measuring a company’s sustainability, to identify how sustainable that company’s practices are.

Myers said that the most challenging part of designing the app was related to accurately pulling the information off of the label.

“The hard part wasn't the footprint math, it was the tag,” he said. “Care labels are tiny, faded, printed sideways, and every brand formats them differently. Getting a phone camera to reliably pull '60% cotton, 40% polyester' off a wrinkled piece of fabric took most of our build time.”

After the app analyzes the environmental footprint, this information appears next to that article of clothing in the app, where a user can view their virtual closet and know at a glance the environmental footprint of each article of clothing they own.

Next, the app uses the phone’s location to suggest local repair, resale or donation centers and shops where a user could bring an article of clothing that they no longer want.

“Basically, we are using keywords that are given to the Google Places API, and from there it’s able to figure out if there are relevant businesses nearby,” Birdsall said.

Myers said this is a key differentiator and benefit of their app.

"Most sustainability apps stop at the guilt,” Myers said. “They tell you your shirt cost 2,700 liters of water and then leave you standing there. We wanted the last screen to be an address, not a statistic."

Chen said that the team is interested in seeing this work continue beyond the hackathon.

“We’ve already reached out to local State College businesses that do clothing reselling to gauge their interest,” she said. “We’re hoping to make this a real thing.”