EcoQuest - Turn your Trash into Treasure (and XP) 🌍 [Earthday challenge]

Arnold Chavez II — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 06:45:18 +0000

This is a submission for Weekend Challenge: Earth Day Edition

What We Built

We built EcoQuest - an AI-powered waste scanner and gamified ecological assistant!

✦ Identify materials in seconds using Multimodal AI
✦ Get instant upcycling recipes for "junk"
✦ Earn XP and rank up from "Seedling" to "Guardian of Gaia"
Every piece of trash you identify and upcycle is one less item in a landfill. EcoQuest uses the Florence-2 model to analyze photos of waste, determine its rarity, and suggest ways to keep it out of the bin.

EcoQuest is inspired by classic RPGs—except instead of slaying dragons, you're slaying the carbon footprint of that empty propane tank or old iron!

Is it a serious project?
It’s a prototype with a heart of gold! Don't try to eat the "Legendary" pizza box, but do follow the crafting recipes!

Are the principles useful to think about?
Absolutely!

Gamification = Engagement = Real World Habits.
By turning waste management into a game with XP, ranks, and "rarity" levels, we can make the circular economy feel like a quest instead of a chore.

In theory, if every household used a tool like this to upcycle just 10% of what they usually throw away, we could:

🏡 Save millions of Gigawatts in manufacturing energy
🌳 Offset a forest's worth of CO2 absorption
📱 Save enough precious metals from e-waste to build billions of new devices
Now THAT is how we save the planet!

Demo

Try Here:

ecoquest-six.vercel.app

There is a scanner at the heart of the app. You provide a photo of your "material" (trash), and the AI transmutation begins!

✦ See the Rarity: Is your trash a "Common" plastic bottle or a "Legendary" e-waste find?
✦ Get the Knowledge: Instant facts about the environmental impact of that material.
✦ Crafting Recipes: Step-by-step ideas to turn your waste into something new (like turning a metal housing into a retro planter).

You can also track your progress on the dashboard as you climb the ranks from a lowly Seedling to a legendary Earth Guardian.

Code

MeenAcey / ecoquest-repo

Alt Repo of the project initiative

♦ ECOQUEST ♦

Waste Detection & Upcycling RPG
Developed by TerraByte · Earth Day 2026
Turning today's waste into tomorrow's treasures.

✦ Overview

EcoQuest is a web application designed to gamify the process of recycling and upcycling. By leveraging AI vision models, EcoQuest identifies waste items from uploaded images, categorizes them by rarity, and provides creative upcycling recipes—all while rewarding the user with experience points (XP) to ascend through environmental ranks.

✦ Key Features

AI Vision Analysis: Powered by Roboflow's Florence-2 model for precise object detection and material identification.
RPG Progression
- Rarity System: Items classified as Common, Rare, Epic, or Legendary.
- XP Rewards: Earn XP for every scan based on item rarity.
- Rank Ascension: Climb from Seedling to Gaia Legend.
Creative Upcycling: Generates contextual "Transmutation Recipes" for your waste.
OCR Integration: Optional text extraction for product labels and packaging context.
Persistent Stats…

View on GitHub

The core logic handles the interaction between the image analysis and the gamification engine. Here is a snippet of how the results are normalized into the game state:

const normalizedResult = {
  ...payload,
  xp: Number(payload.xp || 0),
  itemName: payload.itemName || "Unknown Artifact",
  material: payload.material || "Recyclable Artifact",
  rarity: payload.rarity || "Common",
  upcycleRecipe: payload.upcycleRecipe || "No upcycle idea found.",
  ecoFact: payload.ecoFact || "No eco fact available.",
};

// Update the player's status
if (normalizedResult.xp > 0) {
  addXP(normalizedResult.xp);
  setRank(getRank());
}

How We Built It

Vibe coded with Google Gemini, Claude 4.5 and Antigravity!

We essentially:

Mapped out the "Genshin-impact-meets-Ecology" aesthetic.
Leveraged the Florence-2 model via API for high-precision multimodal analysis.
Built a custom XP and Rank logic system to keep players hooked.
Used Gemini to generate the initial "Eco Knowledge" database and upcycling ideas.
Asked Gemini to polish the UI with "Hoyo-style" gradients and glassmorphism.
Refined the scanner prompts until it could distinguish between "trash" and "treasure.

Prize Categories

Well, we asked an AI to help us build an app that helps humans understand the physical world better. The irony of using high-compute AI to save low-compute resources isn't lost on us—but Gemini was the perfect co-pilot for this Earth Day quest!

Team Submission:

This project was built with ❤️ by:

@noldie17 / MeenAcey @ github (I own both accounts)
@lhycerie

DEV Community: Arnold Chavez II