A global hackathon takes aim at sustainability

When Mayank Pandey moved from rural India to a more urban setting in Australia as a child, his parents were determined to hold onto the deeply held values that had grounded their lives. Perhaps most pervasive, he recalls, was the importance of maintaining a balance with nature.

“The fact that my parents were so dedicated to recycling, composting, and other green practices had a huge impact on me growing up,” he says. “That same mindset took root in me and has only grown with time.”

Today, as a Senior Technology Consultant at EY Oceania in Melbourne, Pandey is part of a development team that helps EY clients solve their business problems — an activity he considers both challenging and intrinsically rewarding. When he heard about a different kind of a challenge, a hackathon sponsored by EY and IBM focused on addressing global sustainability issues, something clicked. “As a developer, I envisioned links between the technology I know and a cause that I care about,” Pandey explains. “I saw it as a great opportunity to make a difference, and to learn something from the experience.”

In a matter of weeks — and working on their own time — Pandey and his four developer teammates from around the world built a cloud-based solution that uses AI to show consumers the carbon impact of the products they use in their everyday lives. The solution, which they call No More Ripe Bananas, was one of 24 submissions from over 1,200 EY employees that took up the challenge, and was selected as a finalist.

To Brad Artigue, the IBM TechHub@EY Global Leader, the Call for Code Global Sustainability Challenge — the hackathon’s official name — proved particularly effective at addressing a perennial challenge for all companies: giving employees the chance to build their skill sets. “One of the best ways to motivate people to experiment with new technologies is to present opportunities they wouldn’t normally have, around issues they care deeply about,” Artigue explains. “We see the Call for Code as a big success because it unleashed their problem-solving instincts, while providing them with powerful tools and training to collaboratively build solutions, and the IBM Hybrid Cloud platform to make them available anywhere in the world.”

Ultimately, the fact that EY participants voluntarily completed 23,000 hours of product-specific training over four weeks — again, all on their own time — stands as a testament to the power of sustainability as a motivating factor. But there’s also another, harder-to-measure dimension of the project where the outcome exceeded expectations: call it global team building.

By design, EY gave participants the freedom to seek out and form their own teams from its global network of developers. On a practical level, this approach served to promote a culture of global collaboration among employees. But it also tapped into the powerful notion that solving “borderless” problems — like climate change and environmental sustainability — requires innovation and teamwork that transcend borders.

Take the case of Anthony Wong, an EY data analytics consultant in Auckland, New Zealand, who saw the challenge as a hands-on opportunity to learn more about sustainability issues. Eating lunch with coworkers in the company cafeteria, Wong was struck by not only the food that was discarded, but also the plastic plates and cups that overflowed their bins. “It troubled me that I didn’t really know where it was all going, and the idea that our food consumption habits were contributing to a global problem,” he says. “And that’s exactly why I joined this challenge.”

His project team — hailing from New Zealand, Australia and the Philippines — found they had a lot in common, like a shared reliance on takeout food during the pandemic and a general revulsion at its unnecessary packaging. More importantly, though, they shared a common determination to design their solution with a laser focus on the end user experience. “We didn’t want to fall into the trap of developing something ‘gee wiz’ that wasn’t as impactful as it could be,” Wong explains.

That, says Wong, was where the diversity of the team members’ backgrounds proved valuable. “All members of the team brought in their own local experiences and situations to define what the solution did and how information was presented,” he explains. “The fact that we were able to incorporate so many different perspectives made it a better solution.” Known as Sussit, their team’s solution was declared the hackathon’s winner.

Sussit uses crowd-sourced data and cloud-based AI models to rate eateries on the overall sustainability of their practices, ranging from where they source their food to the use of compostable packaging. By helping consumers figure out — or “suss” — how well various eatery options align with their personal sustainability priorities, the Sussit app empowers consumers to put their values into action.