Recycle Assistant

Inspiration

Even though office workers want to recycle the waste supplies, cups and utensils etc. there are some serious Challenges in Recycling due to lack of education. Most people know that recycling is a good habit for the environment, but are often unsure of what goes into which recycling bin and what cannot be recycled.

Common Recycling Mistakes Thinking plastic caps are not recyclable. Throwing dirty cardboard and paper in with clean recycling. You don't recycle glossy paper. Not sorting properly. Including plastic bags with your recycling. Not taking advantage of your local recycling program. Not doing your recycling homework.

What it does

Our Monday.com Recycle Assistant aims to promote better recycling by adding autimatic tasks to recycle on a users Monday.com schedule. Then the app will help the users in recycling the mateirlas for the best effectiveness.

Currently, it programmed as a Widget to help users identity which bin would be appropriate to use while throwing away their waste.

Our goal was to integrate this with Monday.com calendar and then implement a maching learning algorithm that will use a Neural Network with appropriate libraries to scan the code on the material and then suggest which bin to use. We ran out of time and could not implement this.

How we built it

We created a Monday.com React.js app. Then we added the code to create a sample widget which asks the users a bunch of questions to identify how to recycle a particular item.

Challenges we ran into

We had to learn how to use the Monday.com platform to create a Work OS app. That took some learning but it was not bad.

We did not know React very much and this was the first time we were using it. So we struggled a lot to get the Frintend UI to work properly with node and npm installation etc. Because of extra time going into learning the platforms anf frameworks we could not devote as much time on the actuall application features that we wanted to show case mainly ML aglorithm to automatically identify where to recycle the waste.

As original idea to integration ML based image scanning could not be completed, we had to rethink about the new UI to create a widget as a placeholder. In the end we did not have much time left to complete the UI.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact the we were able to create a properly running Monday.com/React app. We hope to continue this development and create a worthy application for our users.

What we learned

We learned how to use new tecchnologies like Monday.com Work OS and React to create mobile applications. We hope to continue this further.

What's next for Recycle Assistant

We plan to complete ML image recognition component to classify the waste material into different classes. Then create a proper UI to sort the waste items. We wiil still require a widget based solution as image recognition will not able to classify all items, so our current implementation will still be useful.

We also want to integrate this app with Monday.com tasks which will be put on user's calendars. These tasks will remind them to recycle using the Recycle Assistant.

Furthemore, we have designed this app for Monday.com users, but this idea is generic enough where a similar app can be created for the residentials users also.

Thanks.