Raccoon

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The Problem

With CO2 emissions rising, we know we wanted to address climate change. We know that it's some big shoes to fill, so, we wanted to address the surplus amount of waste in the landfill.

We wanted to address climate change. More specifically, we wanted to address the surplus amount of waste in the landfill. How we can take part in being more eco-conscious and inspiring others to also take action?

The Barrier

People often don’t know how to sort trash and/or where to start. Improper waste management leads to a disproportionate amount of recycling and possible donations going into our landfill - negatively affecting our climate.

People don’t know how to separate trash and other alternatives to immediately throwing it into the landfill bin. People don’t know where to find local recycling centers and don’t recycle.

“The results showed that 32% of Americans are unable to correctly identify the universal recycling symbol signifying a product can be recycled…This highlights the knowledge gap between consumers who are looking to do their part and businesses who are already stepping up to the plate.” (New York Post)

Our Solution

Our solution to reducing waste and encouraging more recycling is an app called Raccoon! Our app hopes to make information about trash sorting more accessible for everyone and provide resources and directions for a more eco-conscious lifestyle.

Inspiration

We found inspiration from many websites that provided resources for recycling. Although they do a good job in listing locations and providing info, they felt unusable or unintuitive. It was difficult to understand where someone could donate something because it wasn’t clearly pointed out on a map. Additionally, none had ways to encourage people to create a healthy habit of recycling properly.

What makes Raccoon Different

What makes Raccoon different? To encourage people to create the healthy eco-conscious habit of proper trash management, we wanted to make “a more intuitive UI that makes it easier for users to know where they can donate/throw away trash” and also “incentive users to keep visiting donation sites and to keep properly throwing away their trash” by creating a dashboard and scavenger hunt.

Raccoon aims to intrinsically motivate users to recycle and donate by providing step-by-step instructions informing them what type of trash category it falls into and where they can find a special handler facility - limiting the amount of unsorted trash that goes directly to the landfill.

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