Salvage 'N' Sustain

Central location for sustainability event promotion and waste reduction.

Comment

Inspiration

This project is inspired by the various textile recycling programs, charitable drives, and eco initiatives that I saw and sometimes participated in growing up. I really admire the effort to repurpose or provide items, but I just run into the problem where I forget about specific programs when I'm actually about to throw things out.

The Problem

Excessive waste generation and improper waste management fill landfills and pollute land, water, and air. Furthermore, creating new resources uses significant energy and depletes natural resources, ultimately contributing to climate change. As part of the solution, initiatives such as toy drives and up-cycling programs upkeep sustainability, prevent items from reaching landfills, and promote community. Proper disposal of items also reduces pollution and encourages resource repurposing.

What it does

Salvage 'N' Sustain acts as the first step for anyone looking to dispose something that could possibly repurposed or given away. The site acts as a central location for programs, drives, events that promote reuse and sustainability. For those who don't find any matching posts, it also provides a disposal guide on how to properly dispose items according to city guidelines. Anyone, whether for personal/local programs or company/organization initiatives, can post to the posting board and contribute to waste reduction! In summary, the site works to reduce the waste caused by consumption culture as well as promote resource sharing and eco-friendly initiatives.

Note

The signup functionality wasn't fixed in time for submission :(
Please enjoy reading through the premade posts and playing with the disposal guide! I have located the error and will fix it once the hackathon ends :)

How we built it

  • React (front-end)
  • Express (back-end)
  • Supabase (database and authentication)
  • Google Gemini (2.0 Flash) (guide generation)
  • Vercel (deployment)

Challenges we ran into

Location Specific Disposal Guide Generation: There isn't a one-size fits all for recycling/disposal guidelines, and most cities have separate websites for their guides. As a result, collecting the data would be quite difficult if I wanted this project to work for any city. To tackle this, I decided to use Gemini, which can be grounded with Google search to support in that regard. In the future, I hope to gather and put together a dataset to train the guide generation.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am just happy that this project really allowed me to continue learning more about react, JavaScript. I've never used express or supabase before, so having the chance to practice with them was really interesting, and I hope to use these tools for future projects.

What's next for Salvage 'N' Sustain

  • Robust Searching: Adding an LLM to break down search to hopefully show more matching postings.
  • Fine-tuned disposal guide generation with real-world recycling guide dataset

Built With

Share this project:

Updates