Earncycle

Earncycle is a telegram bot built to guide, educate and reward Singaporeans for recycling. The bot is able to recognise if an item is recyclable and book door-to-door collection sessions.

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EarnCycle

By OneWolves

Inspiration

Our idea came from a combination of doorstep collection, the Health Promotion Board (HPB) Rewards Programme and eCommerce.

We wanted to build a solution that can easily reach out to a large group of Singaporeans instead of developing a new app. According to postman.gov.sg, Telegram is the #1 messaging app for Singaporeans aged 35 and under. Hence, we choose Telegram as the base of the solution.

In addition, Telegram allows us to launch and build progressive web apps within the app itself to easily add more features if required.

Currently, flyers are disturbed monthly for door-to-door collection. However, these flyers are often thrown away or Singaporeans just simply forget about them because of their busy schedule. Therefore, we wanted to create a better system to remind Singaporeans of the upcoming door-to-door collections.

Recycling Bins

We also wanted to further incentive Singaporeans who are willing to participate in recycling programmes. Similar to the HPB Rewards Programme, we will be rewarding Singaporeans based on the point-based system. We want to allow Singaporeans who are busy to schedule door-to-door collection on top of the monthly recurring collection. Singaporeans can simply add recyclables to a cart-like system to check how many points they will earn.

Recycling Bins

Lastly, we also often see recycling bins filled with non-recyclables. Hence, we wanted to create an image recognition feature which can guide Singaporeans on what items are recyclables.

What it does

Our bot has 3 main core features:

1. Reminders and Awareness

With the convenience of a Telegram Bot, weekly reminders or tips can be sent to users so that they will not forget their scheduled collections and find new ways to recycle.

Our bot will be able to send reminders for upcoming door-to-door collections. This will allow Singaporeans to better manage their recycling schedules and take note of upcoming collections. This is to replace physical flyers which helps reduce paper waste.

The bot will also send weekly tips on recycling and recycling efforts in Singapore to help better educate users.

2. Item Recognition

Sometimes it is difficult to remember what items can be recycled. Users can simply upload an image to the bot and tell the users if it can be recycled. This will help Singaporeans better differentiate between non-recyclables and recyclables.

3. Schedule a Collection

For Singaporeans who can't be around for the monthly upcoming door-to-door collections, we create an eCommerce-like web application on Telegram where users can easily add their recyclables to a "cart" and "checkout" to schedule a collection with recycling partners. By doing so, they can stand a chance to earn points which can be redeemed as vouchers.

How we built it

TypeORM is used as an object-relational mapper library for database management, any SQL supported by TypeORM would work (i.e. MySQL / PostgresSQL). Microsoft SQL was chosen to ease integration with Azure.

The Telegraf library is used for handling telegram requests and Azure Computer Vision is used for image recognition.

Challenges we ran into

  • Identifying the core issue of Singaporeans regarding the lack of recycling
  • Managing a workload with 2 people was a challenge
  • Solving unexpected problems in a short amount of time during a hackathon
  • Simplify our process and workflow to complete within 24 hours.
  • As the information does not have a consistent structure, we had to manually enter the data

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of how far we came, to be able to develop a bot and web app within 24 hours.

What we learned

We learnt how to use Azure Computer Vision for recognizing objects.

What's next for Earncycle

We look forward to implementing this MVP with the door-to-door collection partner, as well as partnerships with government bodies for possible rewards such as vouchers.

We are also considering to further incentivize citizens to recycle by having a competition between neighborhoods and give out prizes for neighborhoods who recycled the most amount of waste.

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