- An estimated 1 in every 5 items sent for recycling is contaminated and cannot be recycled, amounting to an estimated 46,000 tons of contaminated recycling produced by America every day.
- It costs governments millions to treat the waste, but most importantly, it harms the environment by further adding to over-dumped landfills and polluting the air and environment.
- Our AI-powered waste management assistant, PlanetPal, aims to change this.
- PlanetPal is a web app powered by cutting-edge generative AI technologies made to revolutionize education in waste management.
- Ask the assistant ANY question regarding which bin to throw your waste, and they will answer!
Our project is a React project bootstrapped with vite for the frontend. For the backend we incorporate the OpenAI API to utilize their gpt-3.5-turbo LLM. Along with this, we utilized various packages such as react-router-dom, axios, gsap, and @emailjs/browser to implement various features in our web app such as routes, API connections, and animated styling.
- React
- OpenAI API
- JavaScript
- HTML/CSS
- Node.js
- Implementing EmailJS so that messages written in the contact page could get to us
- Having to learn and implement emerging/new technologies
- Time management and organization; planning our schedules and achieving soft deadlines
- Our problem statement and idea; we spent time contemplating but landed on this idea and instantly knew it would be a hit.
- Our About section on our web app came out much better than expected once we applied CSS and React transformations.
- Learning and refining our ReactJS skills! We came into this project with limited React experience and came out as experienced Reactors©.
- Learning emerging technologies: OpenAI's gpt-3.5-turbo LLM API, and integrating it into our web app
- Learning backend development: EmailJS and Node.JS
- Of upmost and extreme importance, COLLABORATION. We learned most to efficiently collaborate and allocate roles so that the least conflicts arose on git and GitHub. 😀
PlanetPal possess immense potential for expansion in the future. In the future, we could implement a backend framework to handle features such as routing. However, so long as the Earth's resources cannot be recycled infinitely and humanity faces scarcity, demand for waste management education will remain high. Let us change the world by educating one by one -- Aim for the sky, shoot for the stars!!