Bin It

FIGMA diagrams
Domain Model/ Design Class Diagram
Domain Model
System Sequence Diagram for placing a bin
Initial front end and backend ideas
Use case diagram

Inspiration

It's a sweltering day in Atlanta, and you just finished drinking your plastic water bottle. You desperately search for a recycling bin but can't seem to find one anywhere in sight. Running late to your hackathon, you pull out Bin It to see where the closest recycling bins are and where they lie on your route. As you approach your destination, you are happy to recycle your bottle and spot a new recycling bin across the street. Pinning the new recycling bin for others to see, you are happy to be promoting more sustainable habits in a user-friendly manner. By providing convenience we nudge people into recycling more while making it more accessible. However, more importantly, we hope to make people kinder to the Earth while having fun with it. Our goal isn’t to combat radical problems such as climate change, but to cultivate deep and authentic care for the environment, all while being easy.

What it does

Our project allows users to find nearby recycling bins in a convenient manner. Bin It decreases littering and fosters a culture of impactful individual behavior that is caring for our environment.

How we built it

The primary tools involved in the development of our web app were React and Firebase. React allowed us to work more effectively together as a team by breaking up the project into smaller subcomponents. Firebase allowed us to abstract away much of the backend and instead focus on the actual functionality of the app. This approach maximized development speed and allowed the team to implement all of the features that we intended to.

Challenges we ran into

The team began the project with only a vague understanding of the technology stack and had to learn much of it on the fly. This lack of experience forced team members to work on what seemed like straightforward features for many hours. We also ran into several errors — specifically with authentication — that were left unsolved, even with mentor support. Our team was forced to abandon some features we were excited about because they were taking up too much time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built all of the core features we expected to see in our application. We went from a team of developers with relatively little knowledge about web development to building a fully functional web app and improving to a much stronger team. Most of all, we are really proud of the teamwork and collaboration that was fostered in our team. By building each other's morale and helping each other over hurdles, we were able to debug big challenges.

What we learned

Prioritizing components of the project, even if that meant pivoting away from parts we put a lot of effort into. We definitely fell victim to the sunk cost fallacy. Our team learned how to manage a steep learning curve under strict time constraints.

What's next for Bin It

Bin It is not going anywhere! In the future, we want to expand upon it via new computer vision and social networking features (reward points) that would improve the incentive for users to use the app and improve their environmental habits. Also to improve on ease, we developed an idea for quick and easy notifications that are set off as the user is near recycling bins.