Bin Buddies

A scalable web app to educate users on the what, where and whys of recycling.

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Inspiration

While waste disposal and recycling is an easy and achievable way everyone can lesson their carbon footprint, a survey in the USA revealed that 62% of respondents worry their lack of knowledge is causing them to recycle incorrectly. Many admit that they want to be able to recycle properly, but either lack the effort to conduct research or are embarrassed to ask for help. We wanted to create a solution to make recycling more intuitive, accessible, and fun.

What it does

User's can either upload an image of what they want to throw away, or be guided through a flow of questions to manually find the object. Our app then detects the object, and categorizes it into a category of waste such as electronics, containers, bottles, etc. Users are then guided through a flow of questions based on the category to better identify the object's state, such as the specific material, whether it's dry/wet, its SPI number, etc. Finally, our app displays how they can best recycle the object, and possibly give suggestions on how to reuse it or local waste disposal centres depending on the specific item.

How we built it

Bin Buddies is a scalable full-stack web app that was designed for mobile screen sizes. On the front-end, we primarily used React, and served our app from a Node Express server. Our app makes use of 2 open source apis: Google Cloud Vision API to detect + extract objects from a user uploaded image of what is being thrown out, and Socrata Open Data API to query the Waste and Recycling Material List (from the city of Edmonton). As Bin Buddies gains users in new areas, new data sets can be added and queried.

Challenges we ran into

  • version control with git
  • serving the React app in express
  • updating states in React

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Intuitive user flow
  • Designing and developing a web app from scratch

What we learned

We learned how to create a web app from ground up, including mocking up a design in Figma, creating the app in React, and serving it from a Node Express server. It was also our first time using Socrata's Open Data API and Google Cloud's Vision API, so we learned a lot about how to make API calls, and parse the returned to be used in our React app.

What's next for Bin Buddies

  1. Gamifying the app to encourage user retention (points, streaks, etc.)
  2. The Social Aspect (build a community, friend activity, leaderboards)
  3. Visualizing your Impact (more data visualizations)
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