Inspiration
My friends and I often drink coffee from shops and when we go to throw the cups away, we find we are not sure which bin to throw them away in. Some say since the cup is paper, it's recyclable. Others actually check the cup and see that the cup says that it should go in the compost. One person notes that since it has been contaminated with food products, that it should probably go in landfill. We also noted this would not be an issue if we had just brought our own cups. That’s when we decided that we would create an app to help people make sure they throw away their trash in the correct bin, and inform them of other alternatives they can use.
What it does
Our app allows the user to upload a picture of their trash and tells them how to dispose of it properly (get rid of excess food, which bin it should go to, etc), what percent of total solid waste it makes up (as taken from the Environmental Protection Agency dataset from 2017), and an additional fact, ranging from how sustainable this type of trash is to other alternative options the user can use instead.
How I built it
We used a NodeJS web server with Express to upload images to a Python script that uses Google Vision API to identify the trash. Using the tags from the Google Vision API, a json file is generated with the appropriate data for each type of trash identified in the photo, which is then displayed using html and css.
Challenges I ran into
Since our team split up the project into different sections, we had difficulty bringing it all together at the end to make one cohesive project.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We’re proud of trying new things, such as using the Google API for the first time, and sticking with our initial idea, even though easier ideas were suggested.
What I learned
We learned that communication is important within the team, as we ran into some issues bringing it all together since we did parts separately. We also learned new skills (working with Google APIs) and furthered our ability of languages we already knew.
What's next for How To Trash
We really wanted to implement an incentive for users to use How To Trash by having a points system for each user, document their trash type and usage over time. We would increase their points if they used something sustainable (eg. glass or aluminum cans) and decrease points if they used something unsustainable (eg. single use plastics). If a certain amount of points was reached for each user, there would be a prize. We also thought it would be interesting to have “friendly competition” between countries to see who can save the most trash or subtract an annual amount of misplaced trash every time the app is used to properly dispose of garbage.
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