Recycle, Donate, and Substitute

Inspiration

What is the issue that we wanted to solve using our design. Well let's take the example of a soda can. You might think, why do I need to recycle this small item and it's not like it's going to bring a huge difference to the environment. Well that's where the major issue is which we want to bring attention to. So, when recyclable items are tossed into garbage instead of recycling, they eventually end up in landfills. Now you may be like what's wrong about that… Well, these items take up valuable space that could otherwise be occupied by non recyclable materials. According to data from Waste Business Journal, American Landfills only have about 11 -16 years of capacity left. So once these landfills reach capacity, new areas will need to be repurposed to create new landfills, and most of the areas repurposed are generally rural areas bringing harm, when normally these areas could help sequester carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, thus affecting the environment.

While some people have the luxuries of throwing away reusable items, other communities lack resources. Recent estimates for global poverty are that 9.2% of the world, or 689 million people, live in extreme poverty on $1.90 or less a day, according to the World Bank. The other issue we are tackling is poverty. There are 775 million people in the world who are illiterate, with another 152 million children set to follow in their footsteps because they aren't attending school. With such large-scale problems like this, we need to provide resources and the great thing is we already have them, one might even say an excess of them.

What it does

Recycle, Reuse and Substitute allows for users to sort their trash and potentially donate them and/or check listings for free donations.

Challenges I ran into

We ran into trouble with collaboration as many of us were in different time zones. Eventually, we saw this as an advantage as we were able to work around the clock. It was also amazing to collaborate with people from across the country! We also had a few issues with implementing the video feature, but eventually, after help from some mentors, we got it! Overall, We are proud of how much we accomplished during this time frame. We learned much about media and machine learning as well as from mentors and workshops

What's next for Recycle, Donate, Substitute

We want to train the ML with a wider range of objects to improve the scale and impact of our product and have our website use web storage so when users create listings or claim listings on their computer, other users can see those changes from their own computer. To add on, we hope to turn our project into a mobile application as well because that way it will be much more accessible to users.