EnviroCycle

EnviroCycle enables users to help meet global recycling requirements by giving them easier access to nearby recycling facilities and helping them classify non-recyclable and recyclable waste.

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Inspiration

As part of the environmental club at our school, WWP High School South, we are faced with the daily challenges of misplaced waste. Due to this, we were encouraged by the fact that our community needs a more efficient system for recycling and easier access to those facilities.

What it does

EnviroCycle is an app that scans an object and determines whether or not it is recyclable. After scanning the object, this app will use your location and find the nearest recycling bin for the user to recycle in, including directions to get there! Our purpose is to create an user-friendly and social good project that can benefit our society by removing consumer excuses of ignorance.

How we built it

For the website for EnviroCycle, we provide a basic and general summary that can sum up not only the purpose of our app but it's use in our current society. We used Atom, a text-editor, to create the website using HTML and CSS. For our main app, we used Swift to program our main app.

Challenges we ran into

Our team faced an incredible amount of challenges but we were able to overcome those challenges by working together and communicating efficiently. One of the most prominent challenges we faced, was learning how to code in Swift as we all had not learned the language before and were up for the challenge to expanding our knowledge on programming.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We came up with a great strategy in the beginning to plan out our process during the hackathon. For example, we first had two members work on Marvel, an app design website, to design and plan out how aesthetic the app would look. Continuing, since we faced a few technical difficulties, we deciding on creating a backup in case of any troubles with the main app so we are proud that we were extremely organized and well-prepared for any problems or difficulties we would face.

What we learned

We not only learned a new language but we also learned how to work well in a team. Since we were a team made on the spot, we had to become acquainted with each other which was an integral part of our learning experience. We also learned how to use Google Cloud and integrate it with an IOS application. Specifically, Google Vision and Google Maps for image classification and location services, respectively. We also learned basic skills of machine learning through our use of Google Vision as we learned how to label data and classify it into useful categories.

What's next for EnviroCycle

We plan on expanding EnviroCycle by implementing it into our school environmental club, as previously mentioned. Continuing, we hope to launch the product in our school and community to spread a strong message on recycling and protecting our environment. Not only do we plan to expand within our local community, but since recycling is a global issue as well, it would be great if we could extend the app to the App Store or other app platforms. As high schoolers, we want to expand our horizons with this project by implementing larger datasets to create models that are more accurate and will help with image classification in the future.

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