There are more than 8 billion people on the planet, and more and more of them are being enfranchised for a 1st-world, carbon intensive, and mega consumerist lifestyle all the time. That has the potential to turn out really badly for all of us in the long run, but your Liberal globalist overlords would prefer it if we don’t think about that. But if there’s one thing we can talk about and agree upon it’s that anything and everything that has reached the end of its working life and can stay out of the trash should stay out of it.
The amount of waste being produced by so many people living a super-modern, ultra-urban lifestyle isn’t realistically going to be curbed, but if there’s anything that can be done to promote more recycling and repurposing then we should all be getting behind that 100%. Our expertise is with dumpster rentals for the Trenton and Colborne region here in Ontario, and the extent of our understanding of Apps is that there’s thousands of them in the Google Play Store.
But there is now an app that has been developed that can let you know if an item is recyclable by simply aiming your smartphone camera lens at it. Some especially smart Swedish developers are the ones behind it, and not surprisingly at all they got some help from those folks at Google that make the Play Store available to you.
We’ve seen more than a few things in our disposal bin rentals that could have gone into recycling, and more than a few times we’ve done our good deed for the day by making sure they do get recycled and don’t end up in regular garbage or eventually a landfill. So we think this new app is about as noteworthy as it gets, and this is what we’ll focus on with this blog entry.
Recycle Ready & How
Bower – the Swedish company’s name – was happy to accept a €1.75M contribution and free support from a team of Google engineers to develop the app over the course of six months. With the app on their phone anyone can use the device to identify everyday items and not only immediately learn if the item is recyclable or not, but also how it can be recycled.
Better yet, the app is free and downloadable on both Android and iOS and the estimated 680,000 people worldwide who are already using it means that is definitely being well received and put to good use. What users do is log a product by scanning its barcode, and then they are rewarded with money and coupons once that item is recycled.
It really is that simple to use – you aim a smartphone camera at an object and the app can immediately detect the item’s type, material, size, and product specifics, and can do it whether the item has a barcode or not. It will also calculate the CO2e savings that can be made by recycling the item and how best to dispose of it, and for a lot of people this is a nice way to help them feel good about what they’re doing and knowing they’re making a difference.
It’s the furthest thing from a waste pick and up disposal service for Colborne and Trenton, and it’s about a thousand times smarter or more than a dumpster rental. Look no further than the fact that the open-source Computer Vision Model used by the Bower app achieves 85-90% accuracy for manual recycling accuracy.
Where, and What
There is more to the superb functionality of this smart recycling app. Bower users will be able to point their smartphone cameras at any form of recycling station and bin anywhere in the world and promptly be informed as to what can be recycled at that location and if an item is a match then it will let you know the best – and fastest – way to recycle it. to do this.
For a rubbish removal service in Trenton you’ll be best served with roll off disposal bins, and we can have them at your site the same day 90+% of the time if you call us in the AM. That’s fast, but this new technology is even faster with an app that identifies recyclable products in seconds. We’re not tech gurus in the slightest, but our writers know of this stuff, including Gemini – a family of multimodal large language models developed by Google’s DeepMind.
Partnerships with over 600 global and local brands is another integral part of the app’s growing success. What this does is help them engage users to increase recycling rates. The estimates are that Bower has helped users recycle over 100 million packages over the last nearly 5 years.
And again, this technology was earmarked to be open-sourced from the beginning, with the idea that other organization can build off it to add future innovations to improve recycling rates globally. Consider as well that Bower and Google have leveraged machine learning technology to make recycling information as accessible as possible, with an aim to incentivize people disposing of items properly.
That’s something that we’ll be keen to see more of here in Ontario, and it would be great to see both Provincial Governments in Canada make efforts to encourage use of such technology. As well as possible implementing any upcoming offshoots it in municipal waste collection and recycling services. We’ll continue to do our part with dumpster rentals for Trenton and Colborne and with mini-bin rentals that are better for challenging locations. However small that may be, we always make sure that waste is disposed of properly and according to Provincial regulations.
Who knows, maybe there will be smart dumpster some day!
If you need a bin for jobsite waste disposal be sure to get in touch with our front desk people here at Load n’ Lift. CFB Trenton members and families receive a 5% discount on all disposal bin rentals, and we also have that same 5% discounts for senior citizens. We want to be the provider you call EVERY time you need a local rubbish removal service.