Sustainable Communities Web Challenge

Saturday, Oct 2, 2021 – 10AM to 6PM ET

Join us in creating online tools for communities focused on
local environmental issues and innovations. Work sessions Sept 25 and 28

Community Apps

Choose your location to see which industries are active in your community, which create the most jobs and which have the biggest environmental impacts.

Explore Environmental Impacts

$10,000 in Awards

Code for America and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are awarding programmers, community reps and designers who help create inspiring tools.

View our Ongoing Project Areas

Register to Participate

We're teaming up with sustainablity experts, community reps, coders and designers around the world to integrate systems in location-focused community impact pages.

Learn about Challenge and Register

Contribute to projects with the US Environmental Protection agency in areas like waste-to-energy, the transition to electric vehicle manufacturing, environmental impact indicators, advanced biofuels and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Learn More about the EPA Web Challenge

Community Apps for Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Code for America, and the Georgia Center of Innovation for Energy Technology have launched the Sustainable Communities Web Challenge, which will award a total of up to $10,000 across all winning participants. The purpose of this challenge is to customize our interactive community starter pages for a community of interest. These pages integrate tools that show the relationships between industries and the environment and local economy with an eye toward informing community decisions around sustainability. Sustainable communities promote health and well-being, such as through materials reuse and recycling, and prevention of environmental releases, while also being economically robust.

The challenge is open to anyone who is interested in creating these community pages, including students from high school through graduate school, community representatives, coders and others. An adult is required to register and oversee participation of any minors.

To start, the challenge asks participants to choose a location of interest – ranging from a local community to multiple states. They can then join a community team or create a new team for their community and use our starter pages to start their community page. To create a competitive challenge entry they may further develop, customize, and improve our existing web tools that integrate EPA models and data, or integrate data, tools or imagery from other sources of their choosing relevant to issues in their community. Participants will compete for $10,000 in awards. The challenge will culminate in a full-day showcase event and award presentation on October 2, 2021.


Explore your community's impacts

Join us for a work shop to prepare for the event

Learn more about USEEIO Community Pages

Project Areas

Starter Pages - Copy and add parameters
JQuery/React - Environmental Profile Editor
React/D3 - Inflow-Outflow and Sankey Charts
Python/R - GitHub Actions Data Pipeline
Python - Machine Learning
UX/UI - Nutrition Labels / Scenario Reporting
Maps - Data Visualizations
Cinematic - Environmental Impact Apps
Project Idea List