(From left: Evelyn Bartlett and Roger Bartlett at Cornstalks Demo Night. Photo by Danny Schreiber.)
This is the second post in a six-post series recapping the demonstrations that took place at Thursday’s Cornstalks Demo Night. To learn more about the event, see our post, “These six startups will present at tonight’s Cornstalks Demo Night.”
Evelyn Bartlett and Roger Bartlett worked as a pair to demonstrate WasteFinder Green App, a smartphone and tablet application created by SectorNow to help businesses monitor and manage their waste disposal and recycling efforts. Currently in beta, the app is scheduled to launch Oct. 1.
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Developed in conjunction with WasteCap Nebraska, the app can be used by entities of all sizes — from small, standalone operations all the way up to large companies with multiple locations — to calculate how much waste is being generated and recycled. Users can document waste management problems and submit them to WasteCap for review and recommendations. The goal of the app, Roger said, is to “waste not and go green a lot” by taking a proactive approach to waste management.
The Bartletts opened the app and illustrated its customizability, which enables it to be used for clients of all kinds. “We can go in and add or subtract or modify the program,” Roger said, “to make it work for your specific business or industry or municipality, for that matter.”
They ran through several different hypothetical scenarios, illustrating WasteFinder’s most basic functionality: with a mobile device, a user enters metrics of some sort of recyclable material, and the app makes calculations for the specific input and returns what quantity is recycled.
Evelyn also discussed a photo-submission feature that, though not demonstrated on Thursday, is in the works and will eventually be part of WasteFinder.
“Let’s say you have a messy dumpster, and you don’t know what to do with that area,” she said. “You can take a picture and write a little description and send it immediately to WasteCap, and they will provide you recommendations on how to better improve recycling practices in that area.”
All data submitted from mobile devices goes into a company-specific database designed to help customers improve their waste management practices over time. The importance of that database was echoed by both Bartletts: “All roads,” they repeated, “lead to the database.”
“Companies can track their practices over time so the database on the back-end actually can tell you how you’re improving your practices from one quarter to the next or from one area to the next, one location to the next,” Evelyn said. “So it’s a very robust database and reporting system on the back-end.”
Note: We experienced technical difficulties while recording the WasteFinder demonstration, so the video below is a truncated version of the presentation.
