GreenBin
Campus habit tracker for recycling, zero-waste, biking, and walking - photo-verified with Google Cloud Vision.
Problem
Habits like recycling, biking instead of driving, or cutting down on waste are easy to intend and easy to drop, especially with no quick way to prove you actually did the thing, or make it feel like part of something shared rather than a private chore.
System design & approach
GreenBin is a campus habit tracker for recycling, zero-waste, biking, and walking. Photo proof runs through Google Cloud Vision, which reads labels from the upload and suggests which green activity it matches. That verification feeds timed challenges and a shared community board, so progress is visible rather than private.
Challenges
Cloud Vision returns generic object labels, not "this person recycled" - the work was in mapping those labels onto specific, hackathon-scoped green activities reliably enough to trust, inside a roughly 24-hour build window.
My role
Like most hackathon builds, the work moved fast and roles overlapped rather than splitting cleanly by feature across the four of us.
Retrospective
Shipped and demoed at Big Red Hacks 2022, deployed live, and open-sourced on GitHub.
Clean Sweep
Grab bottles before they roll into the creek. Join the character for a timed run: collect recyclables, then crop a screenshot as your proof.
- React
- Express
- Cloud Vision