Recycle Me

Inspiration

As companies produce packaging that becomes more and more complex such as blending different materials together and putting laminate on cardboard, it becomes difficult to tell what can and cannot be recycled. However, most foods do contain barcodes and we wanted to leverage that to allow consumers to know what can and cannot be recycled.

What it does

Takes a barcode and looks up whether or not this item can be recycled. The barcode is used to make an API call in a database of foods where we take an image of the food to display on the screen. The barcode is also sent to a node.js API that we made that returns whether the item can be recycled based on our database hosted on Google Cloud. The API call is done by making a request to our domain hosted by domains.com called recycleme.tech

How we built it

We used Google barcode scanner to read the value of a barcode through the camera. This info is stored as a string and used to request a food image from the edemam API and used to retrieve whether the item is recyclable from our MySQL database through an API that we constructed. This information is displayed on the screen.

Challenges we ran into

This was our first time using node.js and creating an android app. Many of our difficulties came from not knowing the design flows of these technologies but we all learned a lot through extensive googling!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of creating our own api endpoint as this was the first time any of us have done back end.

What we learned

We're proud to have learned so many technologies in such a short time. We all feel like we have more experience constructing a full stack application and will definitely use these skills in the future.

What's next for Recycle Me

An expanded database! Right now Recycle Me can only give information on how to recycle a small number of things but with community involvement, the database can be expanded so that even the most obscure packaging will end up in the right bin.