Oscar's Guide to Recycling

Inspiration

What inspired us to make this project is our environment. We are always throwing away our items and not knowing whether or not we can actually recycle them. According to the World Watch Institute, "despite only representing 5% of the world population, the U.S. generates more waste than any other country in the world." A major reason behind this is that most people are not properly educated on recycling and just dispose of everything in the trash, not realizing that it causes the growth in contamination.

What it does

The project starts off asking the user what type of item they wish to dispose of. Once that is known, the project initiates a series of questions until the user knows which bin the items goes in, if they should donate the items, or if they should resell them. Essentially, the user learns a lot about the importance of recycling as well as the many resources around them for recycling.

How we built it

We built our project using the language, Python and the pandas library, alongside researching our information to build our recycling guide.

Challenges we ran into

The Challenges we ran into ranged from coming up with a project idea that is both practical and accomplishable to IDE problems with the handling of certain python libraries. We had to do research into python and other libraries like the pandas library to familiarize ourselves with the language in order to best make use of its features in such a short time. Having to find public useful datasets that would relatively fit well with our project's objectives was also a challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One thing we are proud of is how user-friendly our project is. When utilizing this tool, the user can feel very comfortable while learning about the importance of recycling and sanitation.

What we learned

We became very informed about recycling through this project. In fact, due to our lack of knowledge about recycling, we became very curious about it, hence resulting in the creation of this tool.