Inspiration

Climate change has been a huge topic of discussion recently. Most of us are aware of the problem, but we still aren't actively trying to help the cause. We wanted to inspire others to begin being a bit more environmentally conscious, and to do so, we decided to provide an extra incentive by having an updating balance for every item that is recycled. The idea stemmed from the model that some Nordic countries have at their supermarkets, where customers take their items to be recycled, and in return get a nice paycheck yearly, dependent on the amount recycled.

What it does

Essentially, everybody builds a profile (which is logged in through facial recognition). Whenever they have a recyclable item, they use the app, which scans the item using object detection. Upon doing that, the user's balance gets updated. The business model would be that this would ideally take place at a recycling center.

How we built it

We used Microsoft Azure's Face API, as well as their Cognitive Services (for object detection). We did this through Python.

Challenges we ran into

Learning the API calls were tough to use, as most of the documentation was written for C#.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The model we built for our object detection functionality

What we learned

How to leverage the Face and Cognitive Services API

What's next for recycleForMe

We are thinking of perhaps extending the functionality beyond this Hackathon

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