RecycleJungle

Inspiration

The inspiration behind our project is the issue that most people do not recycle due to 2 main reasons. Firstly, the lack of convenience. Despite there being centralised refuse chutes in most HDBs and condominums, residents would still prefer to throw small items like plastic bags in the chutes in their homes as it is more convenient. Secondly, the lack of knowledge on how to recycle. Research conducted by NEA figures show that over 50% of Singaporeans engage in frequent recycling practices but they do not have sufficient knowledge of what can be recycled or how to dispose of the recyclables properly. Hence, we were inspired to use the telebot to tackle such problems, by educating them on how to recycle properly, and provide locations on where to recycle when we are outside, so we can recycle conveniently as we travel from one destination to another.

What it does

It is a recycling bot that has two main functions. Firstly, it provides educational videos on how to recycle each material that the user has chosen. Secondly, it displays the nearest recycling point near the user's chosen location.

How we built it

We built the telegram bot using python in visual studio code.

Challenges we ran into

It was our first time creating a telebot so it was challenging as it was unfamiliar to us. Another problem we encountered would be how to organize the locations of the recycling points into the 5 regions as there were many recycling points and not all materials could be recycled at every recycling, an example being e-waste. It was also difficult to insert videos into our bot. Due to a lack of time and data, we were also unable to implement the map features for the various recycling points that we initially thought of during our ideation process.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we managed to create a functional bot that is able to display the video on how to recycle based on what material the user has chosen. We are also proud that we were able to overcome our initial challenges in inserting videos and implementing the various commands.

What we learned

We have learned the basic concepts and logic of building a telegram bot, such as responding to button callbacks and saving user info. We also learned how to use command handlers and message handlers to hold a conversation. We learned how to call the API and retrieve the URL of the media to send the media to the chat.

What's next for Untitled

Working on our map function being able to retrieve the live location of users and compare it against the locations of nearby recycling points using the longitude and latitude values