Recycling products is complicated

I was eating some random food, and when I finished my dish, I wanted to throw away the package and the left-overs like a pseudo good cyber fellow. To my horror, I didn’t know in which bin went the different parts of the packaging. Consignes de tri has a very good list of where to throw away materials, but it did not include any explicit product listing. I also found that some slight differences are misleading because they are so much alike (different kind of plastic bottles for example).

So I just launched https://recycleme.yuen.fr, a website using bar codes to find products and filter recycling materials. It scraps different websites to find the corresponding product, and will look into the (very small) database to find the corresponding materials and in which bin to throw them away. Although the whole idea may not be new, I haven’t found a service which provides those data based on bar codes.
The problem is that there is no “open data” database listing all product packages. I am thus building the database little by little.

The legislation and recycling habits are different from place to place in France, so I am focusing in Paris at the moment.

Anyone having any data on a package database, please contact me!

This is still a work in progress!

Code and hosting

The code is hosted on github, written in Go with a mongodb database.

The whole site is hosted on heroku. I tried using only free tiers hosting platforms and services for this personal project.