incentivised_recycling

Final product
Design of the finite state machine

Motivating to Recycle

When you take the extra effort and time to recycle, there are no immediate tangible benefits gained. Looking in the short term, many people may choose to NOT recycle because of this.

Our app attempts to change this by providing a method to track how much one recycles. By recycling, the user will gain points, which could be used as credit to purchase from various vendors supporting our app.

This short-term and tangible incentive combats the reluctance to recycle by providing short term gain. Furthermore, the longer the user uses this app, the greater the impact the user will see their actions have, since the app would keep history and statistics on their recycling habits.

In order to ensure a valid recycling action was completed, our app works along with special recycle bins integrated with a variety of sensors. To begin, the user will place their phone, with the app open, against RFID sensor attached to the bin. Then the user will toss their recyclable item into the bin. Two LED's emitting light into two light sensors with one pair placed above the other detect when a recyclable falls into the container by checking for the top light beam and then the bottom light beam to broken in order, and a weight sensor at the bottom determines if the action of recycling was completed. By checking measurements from these sensors, the bin will verify the transfer and emit a signal back to the phone. This process is detailed in the diagram attached.

Challenges

During this competition, the hardware lab lacked a pressure plate, and the NFC/RFID was not able to send data to the phone. Therefore we switched to Bluetooth to send data from the sensor to the phone.

Further more we attempted to use Flutter, but it lacked documentation on working with Bluetooth, and in the end we weren't able to pick up the signal emitted from the Bluetooth component.

While we weren't able to accomplish what we had in mind, we believe this app is feasible given proper skill sets and time. We also believe this app has the potential to promote a new age of sustainability.