Trash4Impact

Inspiration

As Philadelphian students, we have seen firsthand how filthy the streets can be. It greatly impacts the people of Philadelphia in terms of health, risks of pollution, and general quality of life. We want to help motivate people to do their part in keeping our communities clean.

What it does

Trash4Impact is an app that tracks the trash you’ve picked up and turns it into points used for leveling up and earning rewards. This app involves a gamified structure consisting of levels, streaks, and leaderboards. Users can create personal profiles to track their own records, including a map that documents user cleaned areas and the total clean percentage for the specific city.

How we built it

We built our project with HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, utilizing Leaflet.js for interactive mapping and real-time geolocation features. The app integrates the VolunteerConnector API to display nearby volunteer opportunities, OpenStreetMap for location data, and Nominatim for geocoding services. The design features a mobile-first responsive layout.

Challenges we ran into

We wanted to ensure user accountability for the trash they pick up; while we wanted to reward users for picking up trash, we wanted to make it fair. Originally, we wanted to use a kiosk idea to track, however, this would be too expensive to implement globally. We settled on the idea of having users attend neighborhood clean-up events, where trash they pick up can be weighed by pound by event organizers to ensure fairness.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of the design and functionality of our app, as it’s visually appealing while being able to display map overviews. Our ideas correlate with a huge part of both our lives and everyone else’s lives globally. Our mascot, Stuart, also came out nicely. Overall, our team energy is strong despite many of us meeting each other for the first time.

What we learned

We learned to compromise for the sake of our limits. Though we wanted to expand more on our project in certain aspects, such as building kiosks for recording trash collected and a passive trash collecting idea, some ideas were simply not feasible because of our financial and time limitations.

What's next for Project

With enough traction, we will be able to join hands with existing conservation and cleanup organizations such as Green Philly, The Nature Conservancy, Keep Philly Green, etc. as well as potentially City Council, followed by branching out to company sponsorships and hopefully neighboring states as well. The ultimate goal is to launch globally for a greener, cleaner Earth.