RECYCLE-IT

Home Screen
Logo

Inspiration

The app, RECYCLE-IT, was inspired by our community's lack of knowledge when it comes to recycling plastic. According to CBC, around 27% of Canadians living in Toronto do not properly recycle their plastic, which leads to contamination and costs recycling programs millions of dollars every year. Educating and bringing awareness to this issue is the main goal of RECYCLE-IT. Furthermore, we found that the majority of people have had a moment where they stare at a recycling bin; unsure if their plastic is recyclable. Therefore, we developed an easily accessible app, that’s simple to use, to quickly RECYCLE-IT correctly.

What it does

RECYCLE-IT helps you decide whether your plastic is recyclable or not, and how to properly recycle it
The Home Page includes the 7 categories plastic is organized into, in which the User can choose depending on the type of plastic they have. In addition, there is a navigation bar at the top with a “Help Button” (informs the User how to use the app) and “About Us Button”
When clicked, each category displays information and examples about the specific plastic when

How we built it

The app was built using Expo React Native, and the images were created with PhotoShop and Adobe Illustrator.

Challenges we ran into

Originally, the app was supposed to open the camera preview and use text recognition to scan the label on your plastic item and tell you whether it’s recyclable or not. Due to the environments on our laptops, we were unfortunately unable to build our app with the FireBase directories we were using. Eventually, due to the time constraints, we decided to make a manual entry system. This has the advantage that the user is more involved in finding out which plastics to recycle, and will therefore be more educated about plastic recycling processes.

Another issue we had was integrating all our pieces of code into the final product. Initially, some components of the app were displayed while others weren’t. We’re all relatively new to React.js, so it took a lot of debugging to solve the problem. Fortunately, we were able to figure out the issue, and now RECYCLE-IT can contribute to a more sustainable future.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For the majority of the team, this was our first hackathon, and half of us were new to JavaScript, React Native and Web Development. We’re extremely proud that we stuck with our idea despite the hardships, and were still able to make a polished app. As an added bonus, we all played Bingo and won goose socks, so nothing could get us down after that :D

What we learned

JavaScript and React Native
Expo Go and Expo CLI
App Development
Learned to work in a team; everyone contributed
Learned what it’s like to make a project under intense time constraints

What's next for RECYCLE-IT

Add the camera text recognition feature for scanning the numbers on the recycling labels
Include more than just plastics in our quick guide
Include more detail on the different kinds of plastics
Add a game feature where the User gains points every time they recycle their plastic properly

Built With

Submitted to

Hack with Us - TechNova 2022

Created by

I worked on Front End

Laila Elhossini
This was my first hackathon and I was tasked to work on the Front End.

Sohee Yoon
I worked on the backend of the app where I developed the modals to handle pop-ups displaying information.

Ankiti Aggarwal
I worked on the design aspect of the app. I also made the video editing for our team and app description. Hope you like it.

Rheea Maistry