Don't Burn Your TV

Inspiration

With the short life cycle of electronics in today's digital age, people often resort to unsafe ways to quickly dispose of their items. Throwing your old devices away with normal waste, or burning your used TVs, increases the risk of noxious fumes, water pollution, and injury. This callous yet common attitude towards tech disposal is a clear and present public health risk, one that exacerbates the risk of poor community health in the face of an already tenuous climate. Our team wanted to help people find places to safely dispose of electronics, as well as highlight the lack of resources in certain, specifically rural, areas to spur efforts for resource expansion.

What it does

Our web page provides an interactive map that depicts color-coded points with the location of landfills. Each point has a hover feature that shows the name of the landfill and indicates whether or not the landfill accepts TVs, or tech waste. A legend indicates what type of landfill the dot color indicates.

How we built it

We used Bokeh API for Python to make the map element, and pulled date from the Google Geocode API to plot the locations of landfills on the map. The locations, as well as other information about what types of waste the landfills take, was taken from Google Maps and scraped using R. We used PANDAS to turn our raw data from csv to a data frame to manipulate with our Bokeh Gmap object. Bokeh generated an html file based off our Python code, which we then edited to make the website more legible and aesthetically appealing. Since each of our team members was located in a different state, we used Google Collab and Github to collaborate remotely.

Challenges we ran into

Because of our decision to use Gmap as our Bokeh map tile, we had issues implemented color coded dots. We also initially ran into issues rendering our data from csv to PANDAS dataframe and determining which data types were compatible with which services.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of being able to work together to fix our problems, as well as of our own individual research skills. We were able to quickly learn how to work with a new framework using free information to make a final product.

What we learned

We learned how to use Bokeh API, as well as manipulate data from web APIs like Google Geocode. We also learned about how different data structures from lists to data frames differ and interact in order to make the different elements of our data visualization. To work together, we had to learn how to use Github. We also learned how to read csv files and manipulate them with Python. To make the front-facing web page, we improved out HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills.

What's next for Don't Burn Your TV

Right now, we only have the state of Alabama on our page. Our next step would be to add more states, as well as more helpful information for users like phone numbers and hours. We'd like to add a selection widget to make it easier for people to find their location on the map.