LitterBug

Inspiration

We’ve noticed that many people are keen to recycle but are unsure as to how to properly dispose of each different material

Often, we think that we are helping the environment when, in reality, our contributions cannot be counted due to our incorrect disposal methods

We also realised that some people may feel that they are the only ones trying to make a difference and this can be very disheartening

Recycling should be something fun so we wanted to add a competition element to our solution.

What it does

We decided to create a way for users to scan packaging material and learn how to properly recycle it

Whilst doing this, users can also see their nearest recycling centres should they need to visit one

We also thought that a good way to create a sense of community (in a novel way) would be to allow users to see how many people have scanned a similar item in their postcode

We decided to extend this functionality in order to gamify our solution. Users can view a leaderboard to see which city is currently recycling the most. This encourages a playfully competitive spirit whilst saving the planet.

Finally, we wanted to make our solution as accessible and user-friendly as possible so we have implemented the programmable MMS functionality via WhatsApp using Twilio. Users can text a photo of a material and receive a response detailing how to recycle it.

How we built it

We used the Azure Cloud, Python, Twilio, Flask, WhatsApp API, Google Maps APIs, ngrok, JavaScript

Challenges we ran into

Integrating Twilio with WhatsApp due to security limitations from WhatsApp side
Integrating Python scripts that use Azure with Twilio
Time pressure
Flask

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to use the skills we gained from the Microsoft workshop to leverage Microsoft Azure within our project; both for training our data model and for deploying our website
We managed to link our Python functionality to Twilio

What we learned

Prior to this hackathon, only one member of our team had worked in Python. Learning Python and Flask on the fly has helped us hone our programming and adaptive skills

What's next for LitterBug

We can see LitterBug expanding in multiple direction, we would love to be able to attach our server to raspberry pi with a webcam. The goal of this would be to attach this to bins so that members of the public could 'scan' their rubbish and see if it is eligible for recycling
Another idea that we had was to add the functionality of scanning multiple items at once (e.g. after a party) to see what can be recycled