rizzcycle | Devpost

Inspiration

Did you know that not every item with the recycling symbol printed on it is actually curbside recyclable? We often find that many people do not know how to properly recycle because of this misconception. As it turns out, 62% of Americans are not comfortable recycling out of fear of doing it wrong. It's more complicated than people think, so we decided to build some tools to help out with that!

What it does

Rizzcycle is an interactive website and textbot power duo that teaches the user how to properly recycle their items. Rizzcycle asks you which number it says in the recycle symbol on your item and tells you if it is recyclable or not as well as more information about that item. It gives facts and fun memes about recycling along the way too!

How we built it

We built the text bot with Twilio and python. We also built our website with HTML and CSS for style after we designed it on Figma.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into some minor bugs in our front end and with our environment variable setups. We also ran into some issues because of our lack of knowledge about using Twilio (for example "HELP" cannot be one of our commands for our bot because it is a Twilio command which would override ours).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of creating both an interactive educational resource on recycling and a textbot with just two team members in one day. We worked together well and really played into each of our strengths.

What we learned

This was both of our first times using Twilio. We had a great experience and feel much more comfortable with the technology than before. This enables us to use Twilio in our future projects since we now feel more confident and have seen its capabilities. Additionally, Ashley learned more about frontend development with HTML/CSS and Rachelle learned a lot about using Twilio and other things like securing an auth key and using a gitignore file.

What's next for rizzcycle

We hope to integrate a Google Maps integration to more dynamically locate your closest recycling center based on where your device is. We would also love to integrate the chat bot into our website itself.