As an adult, if you believe that children do not notice things, then you are wrong. Let us listen to the story of Pranet Hiranandani that proves it.  

Pranet was a 6th grader when he noticed a social worker cleaning public places. These were areas filled with waste discarded from our households. This inspired the young mind to build a robotic river cleaning raft for his school science project. He used plastic bottles and cardboard to form the base of the raft. Since then, he commenced finding means to repurpose waste creatively. In the lockdown, Pranet was restrained from playing cricket which inspired him to build an automatic cricket balling machine using repurposed cardboard and plastic bottles. The success of his projects enlightened Pranet on how valuable trash can be. His desire to reach a larger audience through innovations aided him in building an app called Valuable Trash. He sought the help of AI in making the model. Valuable Trash built a gateway of opportunities to Pranet.  

According to Pranet, excess waste is very harmful to our environment. Many campaigns for this, but very few give practical and straightforward solutions. Even people concerned about the environment find it extremely hard to reuse their waste. They run out of ideas and end up throwing them as trash.  

What is Valuable Trash? 

"Valuable Trash is an intuitive and innovative app that helps to repurpose waste”, says Pranet. It enables us to practically and creatively reduce the carbon footprint by making Trash Valuable. Of over 300 million tons of plastic produced annually, around 50% is single-use plastic. More than 8 million tons of plastic end up in the oceans, which has a horrendous impact on life in water and around it. Over 100,000 marine animals die every year from plastic entanglement and ingestion.  

To use the model, users will have to hold their camera near the waste they want to repurpose. A machine learning algorithm classifies the waste based on its type, material and size. The user gets a list of ideas to repurpose their waste with different difficulty levels. An innovative solution is provided with a step-by-step tutorial on repurposing it. Users can follow a step-by-step tutorial to easily repurpose their trash instead of throwing it away.  

Building Valuable Trash 

Pranet was 14 years old when he first signed up for an AI course with Coding & More. The course with Coding & More, which provided him with a basic understanding of AI, aided Pranet in the process of self-learning. Pranet depended on YouTube videos and Articles he came across to develop better knowledge about AI. He used a deep learning approach to build this model. The dataset comprises of 100 images each of Plastic Bottles, Plastic Bags, Plastic Boxes, Soda Cans, Plastic Cutlery and Plastic Glass. He used the MobileNetv2 CNN model to train the dataset. The model now has an accuracy of 92% and a loss of 0.19. The app was developed using Flutter, a multiplatform mobile framework. It was connected to Firebase for cloud services and storing all the tutorials. Firebase Authentication allows the user to sign in for a more personalized experience.  

Building the application was not a piece of cake. Data collection was the biggest challenge in front of Pranet. First, he had to collect images of various waste materials. For this, he made use of Google IRL. After collecting the data, Pranet had to add different varieties as well. His hard work did not go in vain. His achievements are of awe for a 15-year-old. Pranet won the Climate Creator's Award at the Apps for Good Awards 2021 and First Prize at the IIT Young Inventor Techfest 2021. He also Presented at the AI Club Student Research Symposium. 

Future with AI 

Presently Pranet is the student of The Cathedral and John Connon School, Mumbai. Pranet is confident about the role AI will play in a sustainable environment. He is looking forward to partnering with local waste management companies and hosting competitions on Repurposing waste to promote the app. In addition, he is looking forward to starting monetizing with adverts merged into the UI.  Pranet is currently working to improve the overall user experience of the app. He plans to reach out to schools to get young children to start using the app.