Trash It!

Inspiration

When I was volunteering at my old school, I elected to do a presentation to the 1st-3rd graders on how to care for our common world. While preparing for this, I thought that teaching kids how to recycle was a great way to give them a real-life application of my topic. This is when I pulled up sanjoserecycles.org for the first time and saw how different recycling laws were compared to what I was practicing my whole life. I also showed my parents and friends these laws, and they too were surprised at them. Seeing this disparity, I decided that it would be a unique and helpful way for me to help the community with my programming skills. Hence, I set forth on making this a reality and helping San Jose recycle better.

What it does

"Trash It!" sorts what you want to throw away into the right garbage bin automatically, whether it be recycle or trash. Now, we all think that we know what goes in each bin. Plastics and paper go in the recycle bin, and the rest goes in the trash. However, that's actually not the case according to San Jose recycling laws! Plastics like egg cartons, chip bags, and even zip ties go in the garbage bag. Those yellow padded envelopes you get in the mail also go in the black trash can. So do paper cups and even receipts! As you can see, these rules can be hard to memorize. Nevertheless, I don't think that this barrier should stop citizens from recycling properly. With "Trash It!" you can be sure that you're recycling correctly in San Jose. It uses your camera to grab a picture of the item and then uses artificial intelligence to decipher that image into text. Next, it runs the output through another model to classify which bin the recognized item would go into. Finally, it displays the correct bin on your screen in just a few seconds. By just pressing a single button, you can be recycling the proper way! Packaged in the form of a simple and easy to use website, anyone from children to grandparents can use it easily. This is especially helpful for parents wanting to teach their kids how to recycle properly as well.

Challenges we ran into

I faced plenty of technical difficulties while I was programming this application. The first major issue I faced was uploading the image to the recognition API. The file format was base64 when the API only accepts a .png or .jpg file. I also couldn't convert the file in my application due to the limitations of Flutter on web, which is the framework I built this app on. I tried uploading the image to that same website's own image hosting site, but it was sadly broken. Finally, I had to resort to uploading it to a 3rd party hosting site. I sent the link that it produced to the image recognition API. After a few tussles with network policies, I finally got it to work!

What's next for Trash It!

If I made a version 2.0 of this application, I would do 2 things to make it better. First, I would open up the categorizer prompt to allow local laws from all over the world to work perfectly with this application. I would also try to localize running the entire application. I've been experimenting with running large AI models on my own device instead of a company's cloud, and it has worked well so far. If I can bring that technology to this application, I can reduce cost, remove the need for internet, and increase privacy for all users.

Built With

• dart
• flutter