This Texas teen’s inventions take the guesswork out of recycling

Aarav Rao is a sophomore at Jasper High School in Plano. He’s also an innovator.

“I’ve really just been into tech and building stuff,” Rao said.

And he decided to focus his attention on recycling after visiting his grandparents in India.

“So over there, there are actually a lot of good recycling laws and most people really try to follow them. But there’s still like a ton of confusion about what’s recyclable and what’s not, and like how to separate those things properly. So like I remember watching my grandparents trying to figure out what goes where,” Rao said.

Guessing — and getting it wrong — is actually a huge problem in recycling.

“So when a user disposes a styrofoam item in the recyclable bin, for example, it will not go to the correct place and will just end up in the landfill and just contaminate entire batches,” Aarav Rao said.

As a “green ambassador” volunteer at the Plano International Festival, he saw people struggle with the same decisions about where to put waste here in the U.S.

“So I wanted to build something that could like take away that confusion and completely remove the need for people to manually sort through trash,” Rao said.

He spent years prototyping and refining to come up with a physical product he calls SmartBin.

“Which is basically an AI-powered bin that automatically identifies and separates your waste,” Rao said.

The bin has four compartments: recyclables, non-recyclables, organic and e-waste. It uses a camera and technology to identify waste put in the bin and, after a few seconds, automatically sorts it into the right section.

Rao’s earlier prototype was made of an old trash can and his mother’s food steamer. He has iterated since then and plans to continue to do so.

“So getting a manufacturer involved would really let me build something that looks more professional and could actually be used in schools or apartment complexes, which is my eventual goal,” Rao said.

Rao took the same technology and came up with a second tool — the RecyclAI web application.

“That’s basically a more scalable version of SmartBin that lets people take a picture and identify if it’s recyclable or not,” Rao said.

It also uses geolocation technology to help users figure out what is recyclable in their area and where they can dispose of it.

“So all those different plastics, they may not be recyclable in one area or they may be recyclable in another area. So what’s recyclable in Plano, for example, might not be in Frisco because each city has different recycling guidelines and different recycling laws,” Rao said.

Right now, RecyclAI is a web application, but Rao plans to make it a full cross-platform mobile app to make it easier for people to use anywhere.

“So like this was like a really small idea I had a couple of years back and then now it’s grown into something huge,” Rao said. “So it really shows like even how small ideas with motivation and commitment can grow into something that’s beyond what you thought it could grow into.”

Rao and his partner, Panashé Siachitema, recently won 2^nd place at the DFW Youth Climate Conference and Entrepreneurship Competition at UT Dallas. They were rewarded $500 in seed funding to help them with SmartBin and RecyclAI.

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