AI-powered App Turns Smartphone Camera into Remarkable Recycling ResourceAI-powered App Turns Smartphone Camera into Remarkable Recycling Resource

See it, recycle it. That’s the premise of an AI-powered recycling app that lets users determine if an item is recyclable simply by pointing their smartphone camera at it.

The innovation by Swedish recycling platform Bower was funded with a €1.75 million grant last year by the charitable arm of Google. Trained using Google Gemini and released in conjunction with a recycling contest and crowdfunding campaign for a small ownership stake in Bower, this computer vision app has 680,000 users worldwide.

Pokemon Go with a purpose.

”AI is transforming our world, yet its potential to preserve our planet is often overlooked,” explained Bower co-founder and COO Berfin Mert. “I’m very proud of our team for building this remarkable new tool and grateful to the team at Google for treating issues like recycling with the seriousness it deserves. We want consumers across the globe to contribute to the circular economy and start hunting for trash with our app like it’s Pokemon Go.”

Available free for Android and iOS, the app previously let users scan a product’s barcode to log the item, then earn money and coupons when that item was recycled. Now, just scanning the product alone detects the item’s type, material, size, and other details, while also calculating the CO₂ savings that can be made by recycling the item and how best to dispose of it. Users can also scan any form of recycling station and bin around the world for real-time guidance on what can be recycled at that location.

Trained by Google Gemini and crowdsourced user data.

Bower says its new open-source Computer Vision Model is 85% to 90% accurate for manual recycling in the EU, versus 64% previously. The app has been trained by Google’s multimodal large language models and Bower’s crowdsourced user data.

More than 600 global and regional brands, including Nestlé and battery manufacturer Varta, have partnered with Bower to increase recycling rates. Since 2019, Bower has helped users recycle more than 100 million packages. Bower ran a recycling contest in June in which users tried to collect the most points for a $1,000 prize.