Garbage Go (GG)

Earn points by throwing away your garbage to collect all the gambage characters!

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Inspiration

Global landfill levels continue to drastically rise every year, in part due to uncertainty around how to dispose of waste properly. Even during the hackathon, we noticed items such as juice boxes being thrown into the trash, rather than the recycling, highlighting the necessity for an engaging way to educate others on waste sorting. Thus, we decided to create Garbage Go, an app that gamifies the act of sorting your trash to promote sustainability and encourage people to properly throw their garbage.

What it does

Garbage Go allows users to:

  • Scan a piece of garbage with their phone camera
  • Identify whether it is trash, paper, a recyclable container, or compost and find out where to properly dispose of it
  • Earn points for every piece of garbage scanned and use them to earn mystery collectable prizes!

How we built it

We build Garbage Go using React Native with Expo, creating our very first mobile application. We also implemented the Recycling Computer Vision Model to properly sort trash into their respective categories.

Challenges we ran into

One of our main challenges we ran into was finding a model that would accurately categorize garbage into the correct categories. Additionally, we ran into issues with making the carousel as it was difficult learning how to structure our design to be mobile friendly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of creating an intuitive, creative UI design that's mobile friendly, as well as hand drawing each graphic and collectible character. We also successfully implemented a computer vision model to accurately sort garbage into the proper categories. Most importantly, we're proud of designing an engaging system that encourages proper waste disposal.

What we learned

Through this project, we learned how to use React Native, as well as work with Expo Go to create our very first mobile application. We also learned the limitations of using trained models, as despite the large amount of data they contain, they can still be quite inaccurate. Additionally, we gained experience and better understandings of how to create a balanced UI that follows a theme and still functions logically.

What's next for Garbage Go (GG)

We want to make Garbage Go a collaborative experience, allowing for friendly competition with friends to see who can collect the most garbage, and obtain the special golden collectible. We also aim to expand our collection of characters, adding personalized stories to each one in order to truly make them come to life. On the technical aspects, we hope to further refine our classification model, categorizing trash into more specific categories such as differentiating between food scraps and compostable containers, or bottles and cans. Finally, to streamline the login process, we hope to allow users to simply login with their Google accounts.

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