Recyclatory

Inspiration Our team member, Reine, recently attended Take Back the Tap, a recycling event at Florida State University. They gave her several items, such as plastic hangers, a wine cork and plastic utensils, and told her to depose of them properly. She thought she knew what she could recycle, but as it turns out, there was much she didn't know. We give credit to her for the idea to create a website teaching people more about recycling and motivating them to do so.

What it does Recyclatory takes you through a 21 day program, which encourages you to create a life-long habit of recycling and provides you with information and recourses daily to further motivate this habit.

How we built it The backend and login system were built using Python, Sqlite, and the Flask web framework. The frontend was designed using Bootstrap, HTML5, and CSS.

Challenges we ran into Figuring out Google Maps API specifics within the code and how to implement a recycling center locator was a challenge. Amazon Web Services proved to be a challenge because UNC's wifi network wasn't allowing us to access our website. Eventually, one of the mentors was able to help us fix this problem with port redirection.

Accomplishments that we're proud of We were proud of implementing the different user states and login system. As 3 out of the 4 team members are rookie hackers, we were most proud of being able to create a minimum viable product in under 24 hours.

What we learned We learned how to use the Flask framework for basic web development, as well as using it to record user states. We also used how to create EC2 instances on AWS to host web applications.

What's next for Recyclatory In the future, we hope that Recyclatory's search process for recycling venues will be available for people outside of North Carolina. We would like to further the visual design of Recyclatory and implement a "find a recycling center near you" feature.