Scan Your Trash

Scan Your Trash is a citizen science app that invites you to take part in building the future of recycling. With a simple scan of your plastic packaging, you’re helping scientists train machine learning models to recognize and sort waste more accurately.

Plastic waste is everywhere, and it’s complex. Even though reducing and reusing plastic is essential, recycling remains an important part of the solution, especially for the mountains of plastic already in circulation.

While much of the sorting process is already automated, parts of it still require manual intervention, especially at the beginning and end. Our goal is to support this process with robots that can automatically recognize different types of plastic. But in order to train these systems, we need a lot of diverse data.

That’s where you come in.

How It Works 1. Grab a piece of plastic packaging — a bottle, a wrapper, a container. 2. Scan it using your smartphone camera by following the simple instructions in the app. 3. Enter the recycling code if available (usually found inside the recycling symbol). 4. Upload your scan to contribute it to our dataset.

Each video helps us build a better, more diverse training set for machine learning.

Scan Your Trash is part of a research initiative called RecycleBot, which combines lab data, conveyor belt scans from industrial facilities, and real-world contributions like yours. Together, this data helps us train AI systems that can work in real sorting plants.

We believe in transparency and collaboration. That’s why the code of this app and the anonymized dataset it generates will be made open and accessible to researchers, engineers, and anyone interested in solving the global waste problem. Trash-Data should be shared.