Neighborhood Recycling Website

What inspired your project?

We were inspired by how much of a pain it is to recycle or even safely dispose of some items, such as batteries and small e-waste. It seems safe to throw this stuff out, but the metals and compounds inside of them can wreak havoc on the environment. We wanted to make a program to make it easier for people to recycle and safely dispose of these items through a volunteer system. We were also inspired by the story of one of our group members, where one day she did not get her recycling picked up because the town stopped funding that program.

What problem does your project solve?

One of the challenges of efficient and effective recycling is the fact that many household items are toxic and/or harmful to the environment. In order to combat this, many institutions have dedicated their time to finding ways to reuse these items that would otherwise be deposited in landfills, becoming a source of pollution. However, there is the challenge of actually getting these toxic items to these institutions; this is where our project comes in. With our project, volunteers are able to collect harmful household items in their neighborhood and deliver them straight to the independent institutions!

How does your project solve the problem?

It allows neighbors to drop-off their items at a convenient location within their neighborhood, which the volunteer can then pick up once the item pile is full. The volunteer would drive the items over to the nearest special waste center, also provided on the website, and drop them off. The convenience of a collective drop-off would encourage recycling instead of trashing. This would help reduce the size of landfills as well as keep out toxic materials.

What technologies did your project use? Include programming languages, libraries, and any external tools.

Django Python Pip Venv

What challenges did you run into?

Our first challenge was trying to find a problem that was notable enough to require a solution while also being small enough that we could address it within two days, as well as what project we would create to fix this problem. Once we decided on creating a website to address our problem of unusual waste recycling, we had to figure out how we would code this website - we eventually settled on Django. After this, all of us ran into at least one issue with installing Django, Python, or pip on our computers. There were also issues with Github and syncing up the different versions. Collaborating over zoom to code was also an interesting challenge.