Trashdown

The app that lets the community work as a team -- and enter into friendly competition! -- to reduce trash and clean up the neighborhood.

Our solution to cleaning up the streets of a neighborhood is to game-ify the task. We provide a web and mobile game and hardware tools. We will have a web and mobile game for residents to use similar to the 311 mobile apps currently used in cities including San Francisco [1] and a website for the governing body to use. In the mobile game, there are three main features: a report button to report the location of unwanted waste, a map of the neighborhood that shows a heatmap of waste, and a leaderboard page that shows residents and/or groups that have cleaned the most waste. On the website, we show the user the detailed data about waste in the neighborhood. On the hardware side, we have a report button that can be attached to trash cans for people to press on when the trash cans are full, and we also have robots with computer vision capabilities: one type detects trash types to allow for sorting of trash, and one type that detects the amount of trash on a street.

[1] https://sf311.org/help/sf311-mobile-app

Public street sanitation is a problem that plagues cities such as San Fransisco, CA, where there were 14,337 reports of waste on the streets between January 1 and July 12 of 2019 [1]. In San Fransisco, the city's residents recently voted to build the new Sanitation department that will be opened in 2022, as the problem affects the entire city. The main factor that people have pointed out is the fact that there is a habit of residents simply throwing trash on the streets as if the streets were trash cans. With this behavioral component being essential to the problem, we believe that the solution must also lie within behavioral change. We are optimistic that the community can work together to affect change.

Currently, there are ways for waste to be reported by residents such as through apps called Litterati and LitterLotto, but few people are incentivized to do so, and even fewer people are incentivized to help clean up the waste. Litterati themselves, over a 5-day period, mapped and tagged nearly 5,000 pieces of litter in SF, and found that a large proportion came from cigarette butts. This litter still remains on the streets today, with few people motivated to remove them.

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/bay-area-politics/article/San-Francisco-poop-problem-stats-streets-feces-new-16311073.php
[2] https://litterati.org/san-francisco-leverages-litterati-to-generate-4m

The solution serves the minorities, people of all ages, and lower- and middle-income families who reside in neighborhoods currently plagued with unwanted waste on the streets. These are people who own small businesses, go to school, and work in this area. We plan on focusing on the neighborhoods of large urban American cities that are plagued with the most unwanted waste. Based OpenTheBooks.com's data analysis of a waste reports through San Francisco's 311 app from 2011 to 2019, zip code 94102 was the most highly afflicted in all of the city. That's part of the Tenderloin neighborhood, where the residents are 35% Asian, 29% White, 20% Latino, and 10% Black, and where the median income is less than half of the citywide average. It's also where I happen to live in my studio apartment. This solution will impact our lives by helping to improve the cleanliness of the streets and helping us feel more comfortable, happy, and safe living in the neighborhoods where we live. It will also help to foster a stronger community and interaction between residents, as people volunteer to help reduce the waste on the streets of these neighborhoods.

[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2019/04/15/mapping-san-franciscos-human-waste-challenge-132562-case-reports-since-2008/?sh=2cc978105ea5

[2] https://www.sfweekly.com/topstories/who-lives-in-the-tenderloin/

Our team members are a part of the population that we want to serve, residing in both in the center of San Francisco, CA and the center of New York, NY. We have spent our weekends walking around in our communities and volunteering with community street sanitation efforts through partnerships with local non-profits. We have continually been interacting with the communities and conducting research on the different perspectives and what solutions have been tried, and why they have not worked out, hosting discussions between neighbors through the Nextdoor platform. We have also done research on what the financial limitations of the cities are in terms of public sanitation as well as what the current efforts and future plans for public sanitation are.

Based on our research and experience, we conceptualized and began building the optimal solution that we can implement for communities in need. After gathering information about the current products being used such as the 311 mobile app and high-tech trash cans that are installed and used in San Francisco today, we have developed an online platform that currently serves as an initial prototype. We continue to work in the field by volunteering to help out with public sanitation, including picking up trash and working alongside members of non-profit volunteer organizations; our volunteering experience have helped us come up with better user experience design flows on the website. Currently, users are able to test out the platform by submitting reports for various public sanitation procedures similar to how people order food on DoorDash. We are still setting up a system so that volunteers can be notified directly when people submit their reports. Users are also able to see a map of the neighborhood, which we plan to be populated with data as time goes on.

The core technology is software and hardware. Software technology that will be used will be a mobile application and web platform that uses the latest map and location-based service technologies, as well as the computer vision algorithms that will power the classification of trash types and detection of trash amounts.

Our solution does not serve anyone yet since we are preparing to launch our solution. We plan to serve the 25,067 people of the Tenderloin neighborhood [1] in San Francisco, CA next year, since the elimination of trash on the streets of that neighborhood affects people of all ages, genders, races, and incomes in that neighborhood indiscriminately. We do not expect that every resident in the neighborhood will adopt the usage of Trashdown, but we expect that every resident will benefit from the effects of the usage of the platform.

[1] http://www.city-data.com/neighborhood/Tenderloin-San-Francisco-CA.html

Goal 1: Trashdown is piloted in our first neighborhood, Tenderloin.

Goal 2: Reduce the amount of waste in the streets.

Goal 3: Increase the safety and happiness of small businesses, residents, and visitors to the neighborhoods that adopt Trashdown.

Measurement Plan for Goal 1: The backend databases of our web and mobile platforms, along with Google Analytics, will provide the data regarding the number of registered users in Trashdown. If the penetration level is 10%, this means that approximately each building will have at least one member on the platform in the neighborhood. 12,000 cases of waste are reported within the neighborhood on Trashdown, which is approximately 50% of the 23,800 cases that were reported in the SF 311 app in that neighborhood in an average year. 10,000 cases of reported waste are resolved. This is 83% of the number of cases we aim to have been reported.

Measurement Plan for Goal 2: The number of cases closed by the San Francisco Department of Public Works will give us the number of reports of waste. Like in 11.6.1, we will assess the proportion of municipal solid waste collected and managed directly due to the impact of our solution.

Measurement Plan for Goal 3: Data from Google Maps and Yelp will provide information about reviews of the areas and the businesses within the neighborhood. Phone surveys of the residents will also provide data about residence satisfaction. As in 16.1.4, we plan to measure the proportion of the population that feel safe walking alone around the area they live.

In the next year, we plan on building the prototype of the mobile app, so the first barrier will be technical: building and releasing the mobile app. The second barrier will be the market barrier, encouraging those in the community to start using the app. We expect that the market barrier can be reduced by partnering with current volunteer organizations and by working with the government.

Sharon has built many social apps at hackathons, winning several awards such as the House Student App Challenge, Multi-City Innovation Campaign, Palo Alto Civic Hackathon, and SAGE Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition, for her work on platforms that bring communities together, including a platform that was eventually integrated onto the City of Palo Alto website. After graduating from Caltech this past year, she took on a software engineering job in the Tenderloin district in San Francisco, where she now resides. She is an active member of the community, takes walks in the neighborhood on daily basis. Within a week of living in the Tenderloin neighborhood, she began searching for volunteer opportunities to connect with her new home. This has led her to volunteer with local non-profits such as TogetherSF, personally putting on gloves, taking tongs and trash bags, and putting in the hours to help make the neighborhood a cleaner place to live.

Isabel is a life-long resident of NYC, where residents struggle with trash on the streets. She has served as part of several citizen organizations focused on urban conservation and beautification, regularly joining city park and coastal clean-ups. Having participated in a major clean-up for the Ocean Conservancy, Isabel has worked to collect statistics on the litter around the Jamaica Bay area in Queens, NY; having first-hand experience working with other residents on tackling the pervasive trash issue in NYC, she recognizes its severity and has conducted extensive research on approaches to mitigating the problem. As an operations research engineer and product analyst dedicated to improving quality of life in the surrounding community, highly experienced in collaborating with key partners to keep the community clean, and well-informed on state-of-the-art technologies aimed at curbing trash pollution, Isabel is committed to carrying out solutions that eliminate trash from the environment

We have spoken with the TogetherSF volunteering organization in person and plan to partner with them in the future.

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