Can personal data help people reduce their carbon footprint?

Recycling can get confusing if you aren’t familiar with the rules of your municipalities. Recyche is a new app that could help consumers figure out what each product’s packaging is made of and identify the proper recycling for that particular product. By profiling exactly what they are recycling and assisting users in determining how to recycle various products in major cities, users can also track their recycling history.

This knowledge could help people be more sustainably-minded, by explaining how to recycle a product and by letting them track the products they have recycled throughout the year. The application needs access to the phone camera and your location information data to use some of the features.

Some notable features include:

• Barcode scanner to quickly find product recycling information

• Stats section to track weekly, monthly and yearly recycling history with a list and charts

• Recycling product database built by crowdsourcing

Using the platform, one must take a picture and manually enter their type of material to the app once the bar code is scanned. It’s not a seamless user experience yet, but as the database of products grows, it has the potential to become more robust.

Recyche on iTunes

Man recycling via Shutterstock

Originally published at www.psfk.com on March 3, 2016.