The Plastic Project

An app containing resources and tools to help users reduce plastic waste in their daily lives.

We're trying to tackle the issue of excess plastic waste, which is a problem with massive scale. In our community specifically, plastic waste and liter is visible on the streets and throughout the area in which we live, and plastic pollution is also contributing to longer-term environmental issues which we can't yet observe. In addition, plastic waste ends up in the food chain which worsens the ecosystem in which we live, affecting nearly every member of our community. 

For many young people, a lot of this issue stems from confusion and a lack of convenience, especially when it comes to disposing of waste. Many people don't know what to do with different types of waste, and researching exactly to handle specific products is inconvenient for many people. The result is that many teenagers contribute to excess waste in landfills or recycle incorrectly, resulting in the contamination of batches of recycled products. 

This issue has many significant consequences. For example, one result of plastic waste is that the average human consumes nearly 70,000 microplastics each year. In addition, merely 10% of plastic waste was recycled in 2022, and the majority of plastic waste sits in landfills across the globe.

Our solution is a mobile app (and web equivalent) which will provide resources on how to reduce plastic waste and live more sustainably. The app will contain a blog which highlights how to reduce plastic waste and interesting ways that technology has been used to combat the plastic crisis. The app will also feature links to local restaurants and businesses which are eco-friendly. Lastly (and most importantly), the app will feature an AI tool. This tool will use computer vision to help users separate types of waste. Users will point to a piece of waste using the camera, and the app will output information on what to do with that waste and common misconceptions with similar pieces of waste. 

After the AI project is completed, we will continue adding technology-based resources to help people become more eco-friendly. For example, we plan to create a program to simulate how plastic let into the ocean near the coast is dispersed through the ocean and into aquatic ecosystems, helping users visualize the ecological impact of plastic pollution.

Our primary goal is to serve our local population (specifically, our school community). This mainly includes middle and high schools as well as parents and faculty which are connected to the school. As we gain funding and popularity, we will extend our audience to the national and international levels. Our school is massively underserved in terms of environmental education; there are no formal classes in environmental science, and there are very few clubs and activities that involve environmental education. As a result, there is a general culture around environmental issues where people feel very separated from the pollution and its impacts.

With our app, we aim to help educate students in an area where many students have less experience. Through our platform and focus on technological projects (such as the AI project), we aim to make this education convenient, easy, and interesting for students. We also want to make eco-friendly behaviors seem easy and doable, rather than focus on the large-scale impacts.

Our team is a talented set of leaders, programmers, social media managers, writers, and more. Although we a diverse group of people with varying backgrounds and interests, we all have key skills which are important for this project -- namely, experience with computer programming and strong communication skills. 

Moreover, many of us have experience with environmental work and volunteering, so we have prior exposure to running an environmentally focused organization. For instance, Isobel has worked for another environmental nonprofit started at our school, and both Zarak and I have done volunteer tutoring for kids across the nation. These experiences have not only enabled us to become more reliable volunteers and service providers in our community, but have inspired us to create meaningful change through collaborative work.

Our team is also mostly comprised of people from our school, meaning we uniquely understand our target community. Often times we find ourselves designing a product that we would want to use, and this is often generalizable to our broader school population. 

We have taken significant steps to research our solution with members of community. For instance, we developed the idea for this organization in consultation with community members as well as members of our local city council, who assisted us in finding ways to target younger populations and have a real impact. 

Since we are members of the community we are trying to impact, we can easily integrate the feedback of our friends, family, and teachers during the design process, and have made major tweaks according to their feedback. In addition, many of our volunteers (such as Isobel and Zarak) have worked with another environmental nonprofit started at our school. More specifically, they worked with chapter organizations across the globe and learned to assess appropriate solutions for communities with different needs. 

Our solution provides a widely different approach to limiting plastic pollution. Rather than providing a typical environmental education or focusing on large-scale cleanup efforts, we aim to make small and concrete impacts through our convenient mobile app. Our online platform helps to scale our impact, making our service more accessible and convenient for more people. 

In addition, we expect this approach to change how people -- at least in our school community -- view environmental issues. Although we recognize that major environmental change is crucial, we believe that creating a service that thousands of people can use daily to make small but concrete changes is a more enticing and approachable project for students. 

We also expect this will inspire others to use technology to solve issues they're passionate about. In my experience, watching an incredible innovation in work -- like watching an AI separate waste -- is incredibly motivating. We hope that others will feel the same way and be inspired to solve problems that are meaningful to them in the same way.

Next year, we want to have at least 300-500 people download our app and use our AI tool.

This will involve many key steps. First, we will need to officially deploy our app and website equivalent, finish training our AI model, and develop more content for our blog and resources pages. 

In addition, we will also need to grow the community that interacts with our service. We will do this through organizing events such as hackathons and  promoting our service on social media and through school assemblies.

At the core of our solution is software, mainly our app and website. This is crucial to our business because this makes our service widespread, convenient, and realistic for members of our community. It allows us to regularly update with new resources.

Many of our resources are also based in software. For example, our computer vision for separating waste project is based in machine learning, and we plan to add other resources taking advantage of computational power.

We are currently serving around 50 people on our instagram and discord. We have not officially deployed our app or any of our services yet, so we expect this number to grow substantially next year. 

Next year, we aim to serve around 500 people. This includes most of our school community but also includes some people from outside of school. Accordingly, our goal is to eventually start branching out from our school community so that we can broaden our impact.

One of the barriers that may limit our impact in the following year is the culture around environmental change in young communities. Specifically, many people seem to separate themselves from the issue of climate change, and not view it as especially significant. To combat this, we have adopted a uniquely convenient and accessible format, which we hope will result in real, concrete change.

Another barrier that may impact our budget next year is a financial barrier. We have many expenses that we don't yet have funds for. These include the Apple and Android app development programs, prize pools for hackathons and other community events, a server (for storing data and performing large computations), payment for interns and developers, marketing/advertising costs, etc.

We have an informal partnership with Ecolearners, which is another nonprofit started at my school. We mutually promote each other on social media and also promote each other through our networks; for instance, they promote our app to their network of chapters, and we promote their services on our app.

We will eventually be able to use their network to gain international influence as they have several partners across the globe.

We are a service-based business. We provide an app to users, and this app is distributed online. Users are motivated to download the app since they can see the rippling effects of plastic pollution and will want a solution that is realistic and convenient in their daily lives. There will also be events (such as hackathons) with prizes so that people are motivated to get involved.

Sources of income

1. Donations

2. Grants

3. Paid content (exclusive blogs, paid tools, etc.)

We want to keep most of our content free and easily accessible, so most of our income will come from donations and grants.