Toss Mobile

throw it away, the right way

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Inspiration 🌱

Recycling is tough. Despite throwing things away all the time, every day, we've all stalled extra moments between a trash can and its neighboring recycling bin, because where the hell do you put your empty shipping packages?? And then there are batteries, paints and harmful waste, glass bottles, and... oh, compost. I guess that's waste too. Waste disposal procedures should be elementary yet, in practice, are so overcomplicated that we often resort to pure guesswork, since "it doesn't matter that much; it all ends up in the same place, anyways" (you know it matters).

What it does 🤳

Toss is an easy access mobile app that helps you throw it away, the right way. We are essentially an integrated camera, with backend APIs that scan your trash and match it to where it belongs, depending on your local recycling rules.

Some cool features:

  • a built-in camera with and object scanner and barcode/ufc scanner
  • location-dependent trash disposal instructions
  • (coming) weekly environmental news, Toss history, and more...

How we built it 🛠️

We built Toss using Flutter for Dart, Google Cloud Console for data storage, and the Gemini API for fast image recognition (though we would love to train our own waste-labeling model someday 👀). The backend for this project was built using the Flask Python framework.

Challenges we ran into 🏃

Ugh. So many challenges, but here're some of our worst:

  • Picking out what to implement was our biggest challenge. We had so many ideas for Toss but only 24 hours to give it our best. Is our product a half-baked not-quite app? Maybe. Does it also have a ton of potential? Yup, definitely 😤
  • Another challenge was working with a bunch of plugins and APIs. Our app integrates (_read: tries to integrate) a camera, location plugins, and backend with LLMs. Getting them to work together (no fighting, please) was a pain in the--
  • ReactNative simulators. specifically the Android simulator. Two of our three computers were never actually able to run the project

Accomplishments that we're proud of 🏔️

Our prototype on Figma; the UI is just stunning. Also, I pulled my first all-nighter (not something to be proud of, I know)

What we learned ✨

  • The internet is your friend
  • Sleep is too (hahahahah)
  • No, seriously. There's so much you can do with just a computer. Sitting down and giving yourself a chance to create is special.

What's next for Toss Mobile 💡

(Ooh, wouldn't you like to know...)

  • Creating fun user profiles with points, a friend system (and maybeee a way to earn credits off of recycling properly)
  • Improving our backend. Gemini gave us a quick-fix for the 24 hours we were given, but training our own model could allow for more accurate, tailored predictions.
  • Bringing more resources into Toss---maybe a newsletter, achievements, or fun challenges and incentives!

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