Modular Trash Sorting

Inspiration

In my senior year of high school, we went on a class trip to a dump and saw how much of an issue waste management is. Sorting trash could repurpose up to 60% of the trash we throw away, from recycling to compost. I was inspired by an existing product called Oscar Sort, which does pretty much exactly what this project does except it costs a lot of money, needs to be shipped, has a set number of trash cans, can't be changed state-by-state, and doesn't do research for you. I decided to make a trash sorting software that fixes these problems.

What it does

This app is designed so that it can be opened on an iPad, configured in seconds, and then put up next to a bunch of labeled trash cans. The owner of the trash cans inputs the number of bins they have, their region (to optimize positive environmental impact and get local plastic sorting laws), and whatever extra information they want to tell the AI (such as their facility's waste hauling capabilities, the size of the bins, the type of trash produced around the trash cans, and any other preferences). The app then tells the user what each bin should be labeled as. Then, the owner switches to the camera UI and users can start interacting with it. They just have to hold their trash up in front of the camera, and the AI tells them which bin to place the trash in. The bin data is stored in cookies. It's extremely customizable, cheap, quick, and personalizable. As far as I know, something like this doesn't exist.

How I built it

The concept kind of developed as I was working on it. I'm a freshman, but I've been coding for several years and have solid experience with Python and NextJS. I did rely on AI to help me with the syntax of the google-genai library because I didn't have enough time to read the documentation, and the frontend, which is extremely bare bones, was 90% AI generated. I developed this solo.

Challenges I ran into

I had a lot of issues getting the hosting set up with Google Firebase, just because I had so little time. I had to scramble through cors, authentication, hosting, DNS, and everything else. However, there isn't another hosting service I'd prefer.

What we learned

This is my first hackathon ever! I learned how to write code quickly and produce a MVP without worrying too much about the polish.

What's next for Modular Trash Sorting

The security is very bad. There's no app check, the cors isn't configured in the backend, it's vulnerable to prompt injection, users can call the functions unauthenticated, and it's difficult to set up an iPad for public use such that users can't access the other menu (it is possible, just not easy).
Sometimes, the multimodal API reads what's on the can and might, for example, classify a plastic bottle that says "banana" on it as compost. This will need to be fixed.
I'd love to use a more advanced model if I had more Gemini credits.
The UI could be much, much cleaner.
I could add a login so one person can access the same config on multiple devices.