identifying a plastic bag
getting the nearest secondhand collection point to me

RecycleBuddy

Environment Q2

Inspiration

Singaporeans lack a recycling ethos, and in 2021 itself, recycling had fallen to a 10 year low. Imperfect information is one of the top reasons that causes people to not recycle due to the lack of information of where they can recycle, so they end up throwing usable things in the trash. Apart from that, people may try to recycle items with food waste inside and end up causing contamination of recyclables, resulting in less items being recycled.

What it does

Our bot seeks to help alleviate such problems by identifying the item that the user wants to recycle, and provides information on the whereabouts of the nearest recycling point for that item, or even the nearest collection point for second-hand items.

It is made to be as simple to use as possible, and the user only needs to type commands that are shown in the bot greeting message, or just simply click/tap on it.

How we built it

We made use of government supplied datasets to determine the locations of the various places of interest, as well as state of the art computer vision models from huggingface