Walking down the roads in Chennai one night, Vivek Krishna wanted to throw away an empty packet. He and his visiting cousin Rajesh Raman, who is currently based in Melbourne, Australia, spent a few minutes searching for a garbage bin placed by the local municipal corporation, but could not find any.This led them to discuss how much more clean the city would be if people knew the location of every bin. Not even two months later, the cousins have developed an app that can do just that.The software developer cousins started working on the concept a couple of days after the discussion. The idea was to build something to allow people to easily look at a map and view locations of trash bin near them. After two weeks of hard work, the app called Trash It Here was born. It is now available in Google Playstore.
It was Vivek who came up with the idea of digitizing the locations of trash bins and provide an app for people to go through the list. We then thought of giving the user the option to choose the distance by providing a radius of 1, 2 or 5km, informed Rajesh. He added that users can also add new trash bin locations that they do not find on the app and are aware of.Speaking about the way the app was built, Vivek said, We realized that the problem may seem localized but is not limited by geography. Therefore, to make it useful all across the globe, we linked it with Google maps. Though we do realize that it would be most useful in places like India, where trash dumping leads to many inconveniences to people.It has only been around a fortnight since the duo started popularizing the app through social networking sites like Reddit and Twitter, after having released it on Google Playstore. Yet, the app and its website have got some very good feedback from users, with most people welcoming the idea.Within a couple of days of the launch, the database of the website already had 50 bin locations added by users. The database has been exponentially increasing since. This number will increase as the number of users increase, said Vivek.
Till now, we have only used our personal social networking channels to spread the word about the app. We hope to popularize it through more traditional channels soon, said Rajesh. More features would be added to the app to incorporate suggestions given by users as and when required, he added.A map-based application that helps locate trash bins in the vicinity. Linked to Google Maps, it can be used anywhere in the world. Bins can be located within 1km, 2km or 5km radius from the user. All users can add the bins to the app database. The goal of the app is to collate locations of all trash bins in ones locality, encouraging people to use them instead of throwing stuff anywhere. The app is available for Android devices running OS version 4.0 and above. One can also go to the website (trashithere.herokuapp.com) and view the trash bins as well as add a new bin to the database. Plans are to release the app for iPhone users soon.
Till now, we have only used our personal social networking channels to spread the word about the app. We hope to popularize it through more traditional channels soon, said Rajesh. More features would be added to the app to incorporate suggestions given by users as and when required, he added.A map-based application that helps locate trash bins in the vicinity. Linked to Google Maps, it can be used anywhere in the world. Bins can be located within 1km, 2km or 5km radius from the user. All users can add the bins to the app database. The goal of the app is to collate locations of all trash bins in ones locality, encouraging people to use them instead of throwing stuff anywhere. The app is available for Android devices running OS version 4.0 and above. One can also go to the website (trashithere.herokuapp.com) and view the trash bins as well as add a new bin to the database. Plans are to release the app for iPhone users soon.
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