Cobol Project: Littering Reporting and Disposal

Littering is a major problem that threatens the environment, the society, and the economy. It is an economic problem, as it is estimated to cost around €10-13 million across Europe, but it is even more so an environmental problem as litter scattered without care may lead to fire hazards, disease outbreaks, toxic water, air pollution, street flooding, and poisoning of wildlife and animal food sources. Collecting rubbish diffused in large areas is extremely expensive, and some affected natural areas can be part of protected zones, which are considered tremendous assets for the regions. Keeping track, monitoring and regularly cleaning littering sites can be a crucial problem, that involves public authorities, municipalities, companies and citizens. The Cobol Project aims at providing a service currently lacking, one that is able to track litter scattered in the environment with the active help of the global community. As it stands, people are not able to effectively report to the correct authorities dangerous litter, such as batteries or inflammable objects, as the average person does not have the needed knowledge. Moreover, there is no incentive for the average citizen to participate in the selfless activity of removing litter and as a result almost no citizen is involved in the process. 

In order to allow all citizens to participate in a fulfilling way, Cobol aims at making reporting and removing litter a fun and rewarding activity. 

The Cobol Project consists of creating a system for litter reporting with the goal of keeping the environment clean.

• Citizens use mobile devices to report litter around an area

• Members of the authority respond to reports and analyze report data

• Use gamification to encourage the use

Features

• Users can report litter at a specific using the citizen application. The litter reporting requires taking a picture of the site and classifying the type of litter. They must have an account and be logged in to report litter
• Users get rewards for each litter report sent into the system.
• All users can view the map with litter reports and see specific data of a particular report. 
• Authority members and admins can view all submitted reports. For each particular report, they can view its details, including images, location, information about the user that reported, and the site location. 
• Authority members can also manage application users based on the citizen, authority, and admin roles. 
• Authority members can view areas where there are lots of reports (hotspots) as well as statistics about the reported data
• The admin dashboard also handles the management of municipalities.
• There is a public API made available for the reporting functionalities. 

Access to the deployment and screenshots can be found here!

Architecture Overview

Technologies used:

• Typescript, Javascript, React, OpenMaps API + Leaflet
• Django, Django REST Framework, FashAPI
• MongoDB, SQLite
• NGNIX, Docker, Docker Compose

Contact emails: 

Saad Waseem, saadwasem@gmail.com