CleanASF

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About us

The Problem 🗑️

San Francisco faces a complex littering problem that plagues its streets and sidewalks, affecting the city’s environment, public health, and the city’s overall charm. The 2023 San Francisco Street and Sidewalk Maintenance Report reveals alarming statistics: 64% of streets in SF are covered with severe amounts of litter, while 67% of sidewalks suffer from similar issues.

This litter can range from cigarette buts, plastic bags, and beverage containers to larger items like illegally discarded electronics and furniture.

Environmentally, this litter threatens wildlife and contaminates waterways. Litter also attracts pests and propagates diseases, jeopardizing public health. Economically, it deters tourism from the city of SF and undermines local businesses.

Despite the concerted efforts of SF Public Works to maintain cleanliness, the battle against litter still feels impossible and requires active participation from all civilians pick up street litter. However, a report by Keep America Beautiful underscores that many citizens feel that picking up trash is pointless as their efforts are overshadowed by the continuous reappearance of litter. In addition, not knowing what bins to properly dispose different types of trash in further complicates the process. These reasons create a psychological barrier in cleanup efforts from citizens.

Our Solution: CleanASF 🌎

CleanASF is an innovative solution designed to tackle San Francisco's litter problem by making cleanup efforts engaging, competitive, and socially rewarding. By gamifying the process of picking up litter, CleanASF seeks to overcome the sense of futility felt by many and inspire a collective movement towards a cleaner, more beautiful San Francisco.

What it does 💪

CleanASF is a mobile app that works on your Android or IOS device. The user can take a picture of trash they found on the streets of SF and upload their findings as posts so others can see their journey! Once they have taken a picture of the trash as they are about to throw it away, it will be processed by our backend, where a computer vision model will identify the trash objects and then categorize them into compost, landfill, and recycling. The amount of trash identified will contribute to your total trash points. Recycling will give you more points than compost and landfills. In the process, we also get your latitude and longitude to generate data points for our heatmap.

We have a feed with other user's posts and yours, including the location, the time uploaded, and a caption for the post. A leaderboard page gives the user a competitive feeling to do better than other users who also have trash points from picking up trash. The person who is in the first place has their stats displayed.

On the profile page is basic information such as your username and name, analytics like your total compost, landfill, and recycling, and a bar chart to indicate your performance for the current week.

How we built it 🔨

For frontend we used react native, nativewind css, and many react native and expo libraries. For our server actions, we used ngrok and expressjs. For our database interactions, we used Neurelo, mongoose, mongoDB, and AWS s3. For our computer vision model and trash classification, we used a yolov8, python, and the openAI API.

Challenges we ran into 😰

Our entire team was very experienced with web apps, but staying true to the hackathon spirit, we decided to learn something new and build a web app. This was all our first time building with react native and we had a bit of a learning curve. We also had issues with database interactions but with Neurelo we were able to significantly simplify the process.