Chosen Theme
Environment
Problem Statement
In 2021, the National Environment Agency lamented that Singapore’s recycling rate had fallen to a 10 year low. What can we do to encourage more people to recycle, or make recycling more convenient and accessible?
What it does
Our hack is a web application with features that come together to build on and revitalize the recycling culture in Singapore. The low recycling rate in Singapore can be attributed to a lack of public awareness of what can be recycled, as well as the entire landscape of recycling in Singapore. Our hack attempts to solve this problem via a three-pronged approach, (1) educating the public on what can be recycled and how to recycle, and (2) addressing the “convenience” aspect as well as (3) changing the culture of recycling in Singapore.
Firstly, our app aims to educate users on what can be recycled and how to recycle it through a simple, user-friendly query feature that allows users to key in materials they intend to recycle, and it will tell them if it can actually be recycled, and of so, how they should go about recycling it.
As many Singaporeans may find recycling to be inconvenient, we hope to make recycling simpler for them. In Recyclinks, on our map of recycling bins feature, users will be able to locate recycling bins closest to them, allowing them to easily bring their recyclable waste to the bins. On top of this, there is a feed of recycling events happening that provides users information pertaining to recycling drives and events in the community. With this, we hope to bring to fore possibly convenient events users could participate in, and enable them to contribute to the recycling culture in Singapore.
Furthermore, our hack attempts to add fuel to the current culture of recycling in Singapore. Our hack has a feed that allows users to share their personal recycling projects, and encourages discord between users on such projects. With interesting real-life, and community-sourced projects, we hope to stimulate the public to be more involved in Singapore’s recycling efforts. Another feature of our hack allows users to share with others the items they would like to give away, as well as items that they are looking for. This allows users to be able to share their items, that would otherwise be thrown away, with each other, giving such items a new life.
By bringing about more convenience and incorporating a greater community culture with recycling, we hope to influence the public to be more willing and interested in recycling and repurposing their old items.
How we built it
We built our project using mainly ReactJS and the various libraries available, and we also used google APIs for the recycling bin location features. In addition, we used Git to facilitate collaboration between our members.
Difficulties we overcame
Some challenges we faced were that we came up with too many ideas, though not all of them were necessarily relevant to our chosen theme and problem statement. There were a lot of discussions involved for us to select the features that best complemented each other and that we felt were best as a solution to this problem.
Another challenge we faced was that we were relatively new to this specific framework and tech stack. As we have all chosen other tech stacks for our own orbital projects, ReactJS was not the most intuitive to us, and there were a lot of things we had to learn along the way. Ultimately, it was a good challenge for us and is also our biggest learning point of Lifehack 2022.
Biggest learning point
Since our code was very front-end heavy, we were able to learn a lot about styling and coming up with creative ways to present our web application. The UI of our web app is definitely something that we are proud of, especially given that we did not know much about ReactJS coming into this.
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