Trash2Treasure

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Home page
Leaderboard

Inspiration

As Duke students, we have observed a large majority of students neglecting to separate their trash into landfill waste and recyclables, with many simply throwing everything, recyclable or not, into their garbage bins. To be perfectly honest, we at the T2T team are also guilty of this offense and we understand the convenience of throwing everything into a single bin, especially during exam weeks and other particularly stressful times. We believe there is simply not enough incentive and motivation behind the effort of separating your recyclables, and thus, we decided to launch Trash2Treasure in order to encourage students to participate in a worthy cause.

What it does

Trash2Treasure (T2T) is a student-led initiative intended to incentivize waste reduction and enrich recycling efforts within Duke University’s West Campus dormitories. T2T encourages individuals to actively participate in Duke’s sustainability initiatives by offering small incentives as rewards for the dorms (and residents) who are the most successful in achieving their environmental goals. Furthermore, to generate some friendly (or not-so-friendly) competition, we implemented a leaderboard system where users can see and compare their score with that of other users and other dorms, creating a sense of individual and community pride for recycling. T2T is operated through this webpage, which, along with a fully-functioning database and API, was created fully from scratch by our team.

How we built it

For the tech stack, we used React.js for the front-end, Ruby on Rails for the backend, MySQL as our database, and Docker as the container.

Challenges we ran into

We would say that our biggest challenge was the lack of time and experience in software development. Sometimes we would run into bugs that none of us knew how to solve, and it would take a lot of time and effort just to understand the error before even having any idea for how to fix it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Most of us have little to no experience in software development, especially front-end development. As a result, we feel proud of building a simple but functional app.

What we learned

We learned how to use React.js, APIs, and Ruby on Rails. Furthermore, we learned how it feels to be able to develop an app even with the time constraint, and what it's like to work closely with a team to build a software project like this.

What's next for Trash2Treasure

Our team has plenty of ideas and considerations for the future of our webpage and its associated sustainability initiative. Our most immediate future goals are to integrate Duke NetID authentication and implement anti-cheating measures to uphold the integrity of our leaderboard system within the app, while also potentially expanding to Duke East Campus.