Recycle Me

Inspiration

Sustainability becomes a greater concern these days. We want to take action into making the people more concerned about our planet and sparking their will to do the best for its future. Our goal is to educate people about recycling becase there is a huge lack of awareness about the topic.

What it does

The application allows you to either upload a picture from your gallery or take a picture on-the-spot, then it will analyse the picture and tells you whether the item in the picture is recyclable or not and if it is, tells you what bin is must be thrown into

How we built it

We used Android Studio for the creation of the application and for implementing its functionality. We sent queries to the Google Vision AI API which gives as a result labels of things it has recognised in the photo. Then those labels are compared to a data base about what kind of rubbish goes into what kind of rubbish bin. Finally, all information is nicely displayed to the user together with points that he/ she has earned for recycling this item.

Challenges we ran into

Implementing the camera to pass the photo to the quering function (Camera2 API)
Permissions for accessing the Gallery
Reading JSON files

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to work very well as a team, as our synchronisation was on point
We got to network with other students about their ideas
We actually completed the project

What we learned

To work decently with Android Studio
To manipulate android permissions
To plan ahead our work
Nothing goes as smoothly as you think it would // Machkai Grisho

What's next for Recycle Me

Expanding the data base for the recyclable items
Improving the reward system
Including recycling stations for more specific items that are not that easily recycled at home