recyclethis

RecycleThis is a small PHP and XML application I wrote in 2015 using the City of Toronto’s publicly available open data sources.

All my life I’ve struggled with finding a good resource to use to determine what household items are recyclable and what items are not; this application uses the city’s recycling guidelines and data to help determine how a particular item should be disposed of.

The application grabs all of the XML data via PHP, and then compares the user’s search term against this data. If the code finds a match based on a subset of related items grouped together by the city, it will return the list of related items and a generalized description of how to properly dispose of that item and its related items according to the city’s waste management guidelines and policies.