GoGarbage

Reducing Earth's pollution, one piece of trash, paper, metal, and plastic at a time by showing nearby trash or recycle bins/sites.

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Inspiration

In the US we produce about 728,000 tons of wastes each day. To help reduce the amount of littering and promote recycling, we build this project to locate the nearest bin/trash/recycle site.

What it does

GoGarbage is a webapp that integrates the google map technology. The markers on the map pinpoints the location of nearby bins/trash sites, along the type of wastes it accepts. The directions to get to the site are also integrated into the map. Another key feature of our project is to find the closest bin/trash site that accepts a certain kind of waste.

How we built it

The frontend is built with Vue.js and Google Map API. Our backend server is built with node express that integrates the IBM cloudants database. Both the frontend and the backend are hosted on a Google Cloud VM. The chatbot agent we have is prototyped with IBM’s Watson AI.

Challenges we ran into

We had the most trouble calling our backend API from the Vue client. Some errors we constantly faced are CORS, Google Map API difficulties, and authentication for the database.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built a full stack web app that integrates with several cloud technologies, including a working map and an intelligent chatbot! (WOW)

What we learned

We learned how to collaborate as a team: distributing roles, communicating between interfaces, and peer reviewing/debugging code. We also learned about all these new cloud APIs that simplifies advanced technologies.

What's next for GoGarbage

Data collection will be the next phase for our project, since for this service to really be useful we need a lot more data. Another improvement worth mentioning would be to improve the queries efficiency in the backend (we wouldn’t want to query tons of data that is too far away).

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