Intelli-Waste

Creating a way for people to be more active in protecting our Earth through being able to recycle and compost, as well as inform them about the concept of sustainability.

Comment

Disclaimer: The video was made in half a second, don't judge

Inspiration for Intelli-Waste

As the pandemic seems never ending, so are our stay-at-home restrictions. As we all continue to adhere to these restrictions and learn to navigate all our activities from home, the environment has been breathing a sigh of relief. Nevertheless, stay-at-home has increased our consumptions exponentially, resulting in significant rises in household waste production.

Our inspiration for this project was this increased waste production, but still mediocre waste disposal and management systems. All over the world, people are tossing their waste into the trash bin and calling it a day. Although some people are doing this out of laziness, we believe that a lot of people are uninformed or misinformed about proper waste disposal. We hope to make a small difference in people's mindsets towards waste through this app, and hope to make it interesting enough for people to actively work towards doing their part in saving the environment.

What Intelli-Waste does

Intelli-Waste is a smart waste management system powered by state-of-the-art AI. It's incredibly simple to use. Take a picture of a garbage item with your phone and let Intelli-Waste tell you how to dispose it, where to dispose it, and how much you have reduced your carbon footprint! Keep logging waste items and keep increasing your reduced carbon footprint score!

How it works

Intelli-Waste has you sign into the app and then prompts you with 3 different options.

1) You can navigate straight to the camera where you will take a picture of the garbage item. After this picture is taken, our custom ML model will take this image and run it through image analysis to decipher if it is a recyclable item, a compostable item, or trash. Depending on which it is, it will display that to the user and also update your Carbon Footprint in the dashboard with how much just that one piece has affected your daily CO2 output.

2) You can navigate to our maps section which displays every nearby recycling center near you so if you don’t live right on the streets or in a public neighborhood that collects your recycling for you, you can be informed as to where you can find the nearest recycling center.

3) You can navigate to our “Learn More” tab where, by using News API, you can receive links to tons of news articles relating to the concept of sustainability for your own readings. We hope that from this people are able to become more informed about our environment.

Challenges we ran into while creating the app

While creating Intelli-Waste we had a lot of difficulty hooking our Google Maps API with the rest of the app as well as hooking everything up to the backend. It was extremely challenging to train a neural network of such a vast size in such a short period of time. Nevertheless, we managed to train the neural network successfully using cloud services and GPU's in order to speed up our training time significantly. Also, creating a mobile app made it quite difficult to integrate with a web API backend. Another challenge that we faced was that all of our group members were in different timezones, so it was hard to sync up and resolve issues.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We are very proud of being able to successfully integrate all of the different parts of our app together. From the log in/sign up page to the model we used to classify the object as recyclable or compostable, we are very happy with the outcome.

What we learned while making the app

We learned tons about using ML models, utilizing MongoDB, using Flask, and creating mobile apps. For all of us, this was the first time we had really made an app for iOS so using XCode was a pain.

What's next for Intelli-Waste

In the future we would like to:

a. provide news articles directly related to which type of material is identified: recyclable, compostable, or waste.

b. create a better way to track one’s Carbon Footprint and really give the most accurate results possible as to how much they have reduced their footprint and also things they can do to reduce it further apart from just recycling.

c. implement a feature that informs you if a material is both recyclable AND compostable. For example, cardboard! Believe it or not, cardboard can be composted and is actually very good for producing soil over time from microorganisms breaking it down. Since cardboard can be recycled and composted, this would be a good thing to inform users.

We also were planning on implementing a game called “This or That” into our app. It would work by pulling from our image collection and then outputting two, making the user pick which one is recyclable/compostable/trash. If they get it correct, they will move on and repeat the cycle until they have been through 10 rounds (20 pictures). If they get it incorrect, it will direct them to an article about why it is the other option and then move on to repeat the cycle.

We would like to integrate more notifications/popups in and out of app to give users a feel of satisfaction whenever they hit milestones. For example, if a user was to reduce their Carbon Footprint by 20% compared to the average person, they would get a sense of pride in themselves to hopefully keep going and move towards a sustainable lifestyle.

Share this project:

Updates