Re-Up

Inspiration

Every day, the average American produces 4.6 pounds of trash per day. That amounts to 230 million tons produced in this country each year. But what if we could take some of that trash and turn it into something better?

What it does

Meet Re-Up: a mobile app that makes it easy to turn garbage into masterpieces through DIY projects (a process called “upcycling”). Simply take a photo of your trash within the app and it'll analyze the photo with Amazon Rekognition, identify what you’re about to throw away, and search Pinterest for DIY projects to repurpose that item. Not interested in your options? No problem — we’ll show you how to recycle it instead. By encouraging green habits, we hope to keep waste out of landfills, conserve resources, and encourage creativity.

How we built it

We started off with a pen-and-paper flow chart, which later became a UI/UX design in Sketch, which later materialized into an Xcode storyboard in one sleepless night. :)

Challenges we ran into

We wanted to make our app accessible to both iOS and Android users, so we lost a lot of time trying to teach ourselves Ionic Frameworks and Capacitor before we gave up and started learning Xcode overnight. It was also our first time attempting to use APIs, which was a completely different struggle on its own.

Accomplishments we're proud of

Making our very first app!

What we learned

Building an iOS app takes way more than drag-and-drop.

What's next for Re-Up

Once we successfully implement Amazon Rekognition and Pinterest, we'll try to build a social media aspect where you can share (and even sell) your creations on a page within the app.