Recycling Made Easy
Point your mobile device camera at any object and find out which bin it goes in! Designed and developed by DreamWalk in collaboration with ACOR and Adaptation, with support from the NSW EPA as a government initiative. The Recycle Mate app uses advanced AI image detection to identify and classify your garbage to improve recycling contamination. Currently available in NSW only.
NSW Government Launch
Find out all about this groundbreaking new app on 7 News and download the app for iOS and Android to try it for yourself.
First-of-a-kind Mobile Intelligence
Adaptation engaged DreamWalk to design and develop a unique mobile application to assist in eliviating the issue of recycling contamination in New South Wales, Australia.
It was a challenging project on a number of levels. It reguired a large artifical intelligence and machine learning component and also an extremely simply and user-friendly interface to enable quick everyday use by a variety of user demographics.
As part of the Recucle Mate R&D phase, we explored a number of pre-trained object detection machine learning models to us the time and effort of creating one from scratch. In the end, none of the existing, off-the-shelf solutions performed well enough though and we ended up coding all of the AI compnent ourselves using Tensor Flow.
For the user interface (UI), our design team, headed by Creative director Joseph Russell, came up with a highly animated concept based around a simple data flow pattern. This theme is continued throughout the app’s UI, from the initial loading screen through to the calcualting screen presented when the app is detecting and identifying an object.
The result is a highly engaging and resposive mobile app experience that seemingly does the impossible and identifies objects and tells the user which bin to put them in based on their local council requirements.
The app is an ever-evolving work in progress and it learns and gets better at detecting new objects every day.
“None of the off-the-shelf AI solutions performed well enough for our purpose, so we had to train the machine learning model from scratch. Putting in the work and seeing the AI get smarter is very satisfying”
Recycle Mate BETA Trial
Recycle Mate is currently in BETA. After six months of development and training, the custom built machine learning model can now detect hundreds of disposable objects but it is far from perfect. The aim in the next six months is to crowdsource images through the app to aide further AI training and increase the detectable objects to over a thousand before a national launch.
