ReLeaf - Make your recyclables alive

Hi! Welcome to our recycling helper and barter market, ReLeaf.

Do you always find it hard to identify recyclable items? Do you have any idle kinds of stuff that you want to sell or exchange? Do you worry about missing the recycling dates? Do you have trouble scheduling the recycling route and time? Do you also want to contribute to sustainability in your daily life? If your answer is YES, then ReLeaf is your best friend!

Inspiration

Sustainability is a popular and important topic today to everyone. The easiest way to do is the recycle.

We find recycling is a simple but troublesome thing. For example, if you want to recycle a carton box, you have to first identify whether it is recyclable. Then you need to find the nearest recycling point, know their opening time and recycling requirements. Or you need to find out in your living area, which date is for the carton. In this process, we always forget the recycling date and pay much energy for scheduling the recycling.

In addition, sometimes, we also have idle items that are too good to give, sell, or exchange with others.

So we would like to build an eco-system which includes recycling helper and marketplace. Users can easily manage and be rewarded by their sustainable activities like recycling, and they also have a platform to sell, give, and exchange idle items to earn reward points, not money. Then they can use the reward points to buy second-hand stuff in the platform from others.

What it does

Recycling

Camera function: users take photos of their things
Machine Learning + Deep Learning: recognize the recyclable items
Manageable recycling list:
- show the things which are waiting to be recycled
- users can select the things they want to recycle and can be recycled today
Map Kit:
- locate users
- find the nearest recycling points
- show the opening time and date of the points
- organize the best routes of different recycling points
- map and navigate
Alarm Kit:
- Remind users of the day for different recyclables in the list by canton departments

Marketplace

Search function: users can search what they want to buy
Publish function: users can publish an item that they want to sell, give, or exchange
Message function: buyers and sellers can communicate and do bid-ask
Track the ordered consignments

Reward system

Reward by recycling: users will get star points when they arrive at the recycling place and recycle the things
Reward by selling/exchange the idle items: users will get star points when they successfully sell or exchange their idle items
"The price" is defined by the seller. Buyers need to pay the star points to buy the item
Users can use the star points to buy second-hand stuff from other users

Challenges we ran into

New development platform - HMS Huawei: HMS Huawei is a fresh development platform for us as students developers
Android development
All of us are developers
Gain Training data to train our ML and DL kit and increase the accuracy
Use different functions of Huawei phone like camera, speaker, map, and so on
Limited time for developing a huge & complex eco-system
Hybrid team: it is our first time to organize a hybrid team - three are on-site in Zurich and two are remote in Lausanne

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Complete the pretty front-end and logical back-end within a limited time
Make a super good marketing pitch video
Train a good Machine Learning Model to recognize the recyclables as accurate as possible
Call the cool functions of Huawei phone like the camera, the map, the GPS, and so on
Very proud to have all five of us as a team!!!

What we learned

Android and HMS development
ML tool kits in real development
Prototyping by new tools like Figma
Corporation remotely and co-program
The design concept of User Interaction

What's next for ReLeaf

Complete the whole complex back-end logic and prettify the front-end
Add more useful functions to help users simplify their recycling life
Combine with 5G technology to optimize our functions and user experience
Make an IOS version and also the versions for iPad, smartwatches, and some common wearable devices
Start to market it