ReCoil

Inspiration

We were inspired by the habits of some of our relatives who love to cook but often dispose of their used oil improperly. This careless disposal leads to dangerous liquid waste that can harm both the environment and public health. When creating this project, we asked ourselves: Is there a concrete solution to this problem?

We realized that many people still don’t know that used cooking oil, motor oil, and other waste oils should never be thrown away carelessly. Most are also unaware that there are professionals and companies who can actually process this oil waste into valuable products.

Eventually, we came up with the idea to connect waste oil agents and biodiesel processing companies to raise public awareness and promote proper waste oil recycling.

What It Does

This application allows users to:

Exchange used cooking oil with verified agents
Earn money directly from their waste
Purchase refined products
Join a community blog and Q&A forum
Interact with our AI chatbot for guidance and assistance

Our platform empowers everyday users to take small actions with big environmental impact.

How We Built It

We developed this project using:

Django as the backend framework
Next.js for the frontend
Figma for collaborative UI/UX design
NeonDB as our PostgreSQL database
AWS S3 for image and media storage
Google Maps API for geolocation and mapping
OpenAI GPT API for our Eco AI chatbot

We collaborated effectively across design, frontend, and backend teams to bring it all together.

Challenges We Ran Into

Some of the toughest challenges we faced included:

Integrating multiple cloud services with limited documentation
Handling image uploads securely via AWS S3
Automating maps and geolocation with Google Maps API
Embedding AI with GPT API in a user-friendly interface
Managing our time wisely under the constraints of a short hackathon period

Despite these hurdles, we pushed forward and found solutions together.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

We’re proud to have:

Built a fully functional app from scratch within a short timeline
Overcome multiple technical integrations
Designed a clean and intuitive interface
Created a platform that’s not only useful, but also socially impactful

This was a win for both our technical growth and our mission-driven vision.

What We Learned

From this project, we learned:

How to efficiently use cloud services and third-party APIs in real-world applications
The importance of clean code structure and modular design
How to communicate effectively under pressure as a team

This experience gave us real-world insight into full-stack development and social entrepreneurship.