Response to Blog Post on WasteWise
Thank you for your questions, Carolina! They bring up important points that we hope to address on our app. I have some responses to your questions below:
Will people really open their phones to see where to dispose something they are holding? What if they are convinced that waiting for a bin is going to be faster than checking their phones?
Personally, I think this is one of the major challenges WasteWise will have. People may have to dispose of their waste multiple times throughout the day, and one can imagine that it can get annoying for people to open their phones each time. One way my team was planning on tackling this issue is by gamifying the experience. By having users track how much waste they have disposed of sustainably, how many overflowing waste bins they have reported, etc., we hope to incentivize users to track their disposal habits, which they do multiple times a day or all at once before going to sleep if that is more convenient, for example. The badges can also be awarded to entire regions/communities for keeping a low contamination percentage in their waste bins. Additionally, we plan on adding an educational game where the user can have fun sorting a variety of items into bins, helping them memorize how to dispose of those items. To make searching for an item/bin on a phone not feel like too much extra time, we hope to make this searching efficient by constructing our interface appropriately.
What are the consequences of bringing lots of people to a single disposable place?
With people being able to locate disposal bins more easily, it is very probable that those bins will be used more frequently and fill up quicker, but we do not think this will be an issue. If our app is successful, we hope to work with waste management teams to help them make better, more informed decisions of where there should be more bins, how often they should be taken out, etc., which would help avoid scenarios like the overflowing of bins. As a second measure, users can report when they see a waste bin that is full, which would notify the waste management team so that they can act.
Once again, thank you for feedback! We will keep it in mind when making our app! 🙂