MIT App Inventor Summer Appathon 2022 Winner Youth Team: First Place: RecyLink; by Jiayu Fan, Aaron Li and Ambrose Luo
There are 481 billion plastic bottles used worldwide each year and only 9% were recycled.
The current recycling programs are not working efficiently. California’s government recently announced that 600 million dollars in refunds are still waiting to be claimed, and they plan to double the refund rate. There are thousands of recycling centers throughout the USA but not many people go there for recycling due to inconvenience. The students want to participate in recycling but do not know how. The schools lack funding. This problem cannot be solved by raising government refunds alone.
Three main pain points caused this issue. Firstly, there is a re-counting issue. Laborers have to pour out all the bottles manually, making it inefficient. Secondly, our efforts in recycling could not be recorded. Thirdly, communication between the students, schools, and recycling centers lacks efficiency.
It’s an intelligent app designed with the Framework of the “MIT App Inventor Frontend & Application Server” structure, easy to use, lightweight, and powerful to integrate the popular YOLOv5 AI model.
Our app, RecyLink, will help schools get more reimbursement from the government, use the data to encourage the top activists, and make forecasts for the future. Students will be able to see their historical achievements without recounting the dirty bottles. Furthermore, because of the scalability of the framework we chose for RecyLink, we could always call new AI models. This can help add more features to our app such as recognizing more types of bottles and improving our existing model’s accuracy.
Trusting the power of time and data, RecyLink could make recycling a habit, a fashion, and a business. Lastly, recycling for a shared future.