DUE students, Darcy Bender and Bernardo Loureiro along with their colleagues Leila Santiago and Pedro Lambert were among 40+ other teams that are building tech to improve the city by equipping NYC residents with new tools to achieve zero waste. They demoed their app, “Waste Census NYC” in the NYC BigApps competition Sunday, November 1st after making it past the first competition round. Here’s what they have to say about their app.

Q: What is the function of your zero waste app? How does it work?

Waste Census NYC Team: The app turns existing City data into numbers that hopefully the public can relate to. You can access the app at www.wastecensusnyc.org, enter your address and see how your neighborhood is recycling, composting and reducing waste. It compares your data to the city average and shows how you’ve been changing over time. Our intention is that this will make people conscious of how much more we need to recycle, compost, and reduce to reach the Zero Waste goal.

Q: How did your design process lead you to this proposal?


WC NYC: The City currently publishes data on waste and recyclables collection by Community Districts (areas of the city that have a few neighborhoods in them). This data is not very visual and is difficult to understand. After brainstorming several ideas, we decided to build an app to better visualize this data. We developed the app in an agile manner, trying to deliver a functioning product as quick as possible, and then we iterated and improved it.

Q: What are your next steps in this process? Where do you hope to see this go?

WC NYC: We would like to partner with community organizations that would help publicize this app. With feedback from users we can try to improve our app’s usability. We would also like to see the City publish more detailed and granular data on waste collection – data in a smaller scale, ideally by block. With this we could make this visualization more effective, by addressing the public block by block.

We also see potential in user-generated data about personal consumption and waste production through technology such as sensor-enabled “smart” products and personal activity tracking and visualizing applications.

Q: How do you see your app affecting urban processes?

WC NYC: We believe in transparency and open data to transform urban systems. Right now there are discussions about how to achieve Zero Waste through changing behavior at a household scale. We believe that more data and data that is easier to read and understand at a personal scale can help support these important discussions.

To learn more about their app, visit their site at www.wastecensusnyc.org