Trash Bot

Inspiration

Singapore is renowned for its efficiency and cleanliness, and aims to become a ‘Zero Waste Nation’. However the island state fares weakly when it comes to responsible resource recovery. The domestic recycling rate has decreased from 17 percent in 2019 to 13 percent in 2020, and only 4% out of 868000 tonnes of plastic waste is recycled. With Singapore's only landfill expected to reach max capacity by 2035, imminent actions are required to transition our production and consumption patterns towards more sustainable practices. Hence we decided to create the Trash Bot, which encourages recycling among Singaporeans by showing how easy it is to recycle waste and reduce our outputs.

What it does

Firstly, the Trash Bot informs users about the various recycling initiatives rolled out by the government and prompts the user to select which one they would prefer according to the type of waste they have. Next, based on their current location, the Trash Bot provides a list of recycling/collection points in their vicinity. Finally, it also provides a list of Do's and Don'ts when recycling each type of material.

How we built it

Firstly, we sourced and extracted the necessary data from publicly available datasets for the locations of all types of recycling/collection points. Next, we created a fully functional Telegram bot which provides the aforementioned functions.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges we faced were extracting the exact coordinates of the locations of the recycling/collection points as the coordinates were crucial in determining the distance from the user. We also faced difficulties in debugging the Telegram bot but we managed to solve the issues successfully.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Through the workshops before SUTD's What the Hack, we learnt how to make a Telegram bot from scratch. With the basics that we had acquired, we were able to build another bot to serve another purpose.

What we learned

This hackathon encouraged us to tackle issues pertaining to waste management and through this we were able to learn and attain a greater social and environment awareness of real world issues that exist in Singapore.

What's next for Trash Bot

Our future plans include adding a map and providing directions to any recycling/collection point with the help of Google Maps. We also aim to include a function that allows users to upload images and training an image classification model which can identify the types of waste present.