RecyLink wins Rep. Sara Jacobs’ 2022 Congressional App Challenge in California’s 53rd District

When asked what inspired the creation of RecyLink, the students said, ”Global warming has become a more and more serious issue in our world. There are 481 BILLION plastic bottles used worldwide each year and only 9% were recycled because the current recycling programs are NOT working efficiently. In fact, California’s government recently announced that 600 million dollars in refunds are still waiting to be claimed, and they plan to double the refund rate to increase incentives. Many states are facing the same problems. There are thousands of recycling centers throughout the USA but not many people go there for recycling due to inconvenience and the increasing cost of transportation. In the meantime, the students want to participate in recycling but do not know how. The schools also lack funding to run educational and extracurricular activities including recycling programs. However, we believe the problems will not be solved by raising the government refund alone.

After observing the daily lives around us, we found that the root cause of the low recycling efficiency issue is due to three main pain points. Firstly, the re-counting issue. Laborers are always needed to pour out all the bottles collected to recount them before delivering them over to the recycling centers, which makes the whole process very time-consuming, labor-intensive, and unappealing. Secondly, lack of an integrated information system to record and track all bottles recycled by each student in real time. The students’ contributions could not be recorded accurately, thus the positive incentives could not be awarded accordingly to encourage the students to do more recycling activities. Thirdly, the silo communication network among the stakeholders, namely, the students, schools, and recycling centers, generates long lead time between activities during the process of recycling.

After analyzing the problems and issues, we believe that a user scenario innovation, with the help of AI technology, will make a difference. So, we designed an app called “RecyLink”, to link the real-world recycling activities with the virtual digital data ocean, to link the people from different locations and among different roles, and to link historical data to the future trends.”