St. Petersburg launches waste segregation consulting bot

Since June 15, St. Petersburg citizens can consult Telegram bot, Open Recycle Bot, on sorting out accumulated wastes.

To use the service, users should send the name or photo of an object to the chat. The bot will recognize an object and respond whether it can be recycled or not. If this is the case, it will send you the list of the nearest waste receiving centers of such a kind.

Currently, the bot is able to recognize eight types of rubbish: glass, aluminum cans, PET bottles, paper cups, crumpled papers, checks, cellulose wrappings, and foil paper.

With the project being launched in the test mode, the bot can sometimes be mistaken. Service developers ask users to write them about bugs so that they could fix them as soon as possible. The chat has a special button for convenient feedback.

The chatbot for separate waste collection was developed by St. Petersburg programmers. They presented their project at the annual event called Open & Big Data Hackathon and obtain a grant amounting to 70 000 rubles for launching the product.

Developers hope that their bot will allow to solve the issue related with the rapid increase of the rubbish dump space, as the bigger amount of wastes will be recycled. Project initiators are actively cooperating with Razdelnyi sbor (Separate collection) organization and Greenpeace Russia resource.

The project code is publicly available on GitHub.