Developing a Visualization System for Supporting and Increasing Recycling Around Arizona
Team:
Ryan Demboski
Role(s): Team Lead,
Full-Stack Dev, GIS Dev
Justin Eggan
Role(s): GIS Dev
Jack Gilliam
Role(s): Frontend Dev
Vahid Fard
Role(s): Team Mentor
Project Description:
Our project aims to help make the state of Arizona a more recycling-intensive state. Arizona currently ranks 33rd out of the 50 states for waste management, and this project seeks to help with this problem. The goal of the project is to create a webpage that allows data from the Arizona Recycling Potential (ARP) team to help visualize where recycling needs are being met in the state of Arizona, and where they are falling short.
This project, as such, is a collaborative effort between GreenAZ and the ARP team. The ARP team began Phase 1 of the project (conducting research and getting preliminary data) last year, and has been approved by the Arizona Board of Regents to be used in a greater project to reduce Ozone and Recycling waste in Arizona. The initial concept for this project was provided by our sponsor, in the form of a Capstone Project Proposal.
We have developed a visualization system for the data collected during the project's initial phase, and it will help
visualize the complex spreadsheets of data from the ARP model.
Click on the button below to check out the website for yourself!
Project Sponsor Information:
Richard Rushforth, PhD
Assistant Research Professor at NAU
Research interests: Adaptive water management, socio-hydrology, water policy.
Richard Rushforth is an Assistant Research Professor in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems at Northern Arizona University. His research focuses on big data modeling of food, energy, and water systems to further the understanding of complex, coupled natural-human systems. His PhD is in Civil, Environmental, and Sustainable Engineering from Arizona State University. He also holds degrees from the University of Oxford (M.Sc. Waster Science, Policy, and Management) and the University of Arizona (M.S., Soil, Water, and Environmental Science; B.S., Environmental Science) as well as an M.B.A. from the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University.
The project is also being sponsored by the Arizona Recycling Potential (ARP) team. This team is a collaborative effort between Northern Arizona University and Arizona State University.
High Level Requirements:
The high-level requirements that we settled upon before developing this project were as follows;
- A fully functional website where users, developers, shareholders, and other relevant people can conveniently access the data for the Arizona Recycling Potential project.
- A web-based system with interactive panes that allow a user or developer to create simple charts, such as pie charts, bar graphs, and other commonly-used graphs.
- A web-based GIS system that allows users or developers to create simple maps using data from the ARP team.
- Let users upload their own csv datasets for visualization for themselves, and also have default data available to all users through our database system.
Our Solution:
We have developed a full-stack application that details recycling options for municipalities in Arizona by providing interactive GIS maps and various kinds of graphs with default data sources as well as allowing the user to upload their own data.
Stakeholders will use the visualization system to coalesce a network of state, county, and
community economic development organizations to co-develop and identify hotspot markets to attract
recyclable materials and businesses to Arizona. We can do this by waste material streams, industries, and
local/regional needs.
The needs for each municipality are different. To allow this a successful product, we have made sure it's easy to understand the pros and cons of different approaches for each municipality. The application will make it easy to visualize the best solution for implementing a better circular economy for each location.
For GreenAZ specifically, our Minimum Viable Product for this solution was successfully completed in Spring 2023. We built interactive panes in the application to graph data; a simple map and standard
chart templates, such as pie, stacked area, line graphs, and more. After approval by the
ARP Project Team, continuation of our alpha version of the visualization system will be slated for further development during subsequent years of the project. GreenAZ discovered the requirements and built a solid foundation to build upon in the future.
Technologies:
MongoDB, Express, Angular, Node - The MEAN stack is our project architecture
QGIS, Leaflet, Chart.js - These served as our visualization frameworks
Podman - A derivative of Docker that we used for deployment
