VerdiLoop: Close the loop on what a city throws away and cut what it burns.
Discover how we built a gamified urban sustainability platform using AWS Serverless, React, and spatial clustering to unify waste segregation, informal recycling, rooftop solar, and active transit into real-time carbon rewards that nudge cities out of cars.
Closing the Urban Loop: Building a Gamified Waste, Clean Energy & Active Transit Platform on AWS
Cities today face two deeply connected sustainability challenges: overflowing landfills from unsegregated waste and rising carbon emissions from single-occupancy car commutes. While plenty of single-purpose apps track either recycling drop-offs or bike rides in isolation, real urban circularity happens when you connect what a city throws away with how it powers itself and moves its citizens.
That is why we built VerdiLoop—a unified urban circularity, clean energy, and active mobility platform powered by AWS Serverless, React 19, TypeScript, and Google Maps Platform with Supercluster.
The Problem We Wanted to Solve
To make sustainable habits stick across all age groups, cities need to solve three friction points simultaneously:
Fragmented Infrastructure: Residents rarely know where the nearest 4-stream segregation kiosk, certified e-waste vault, rooftop solar microgrid, or bike-share dock is located.
Invisible Informal Recyclers: Informal waste pickers handle a massive share of urban material recovery, yet they are often excluded from digital civic platforms and fair-price verification.
Lack of Immediate Incentives: Choosing public transit over a car or charging an EV during midday solar peak hours saves real carbon, but citizens rarely see their impact measured or rewarded in real time.
Key Features of VerdiLoop
- High-Density Spatial Clustering (Cluster Map) A city-scale platform must render hundreds of physical drop-off hubs, solar nodes, smart EV chargers, and transit docks without lagging. We integrated the Google Maps JavaScript API (@vis.gl/react-google-maps) with Supercluster to build an in-memory KD-tree spatial index of 140+ urban sustainability nodes across 10 districts.
- As users pan and zoom, nearby facilities automatically group into high-contrast clusters. Clicking any dense cluster smoothly zooms to its expansion level and opens a Cluster Drill-Down Inspector, allowing citizens to inspect capacity, carbon factors, and log verified actions in one tap.
- Closing the Waste & Clean Energy Loop (Waste & Solar) VerdiLoop covers the complete physical loop of urban resources: Source Segregation, Recycling & E-Waste: Citizens log 4-stream wet/dry segregation and certified lithium-ion e-waste recovery.
- Informal Recyclers Cooperative Network: Residents connect with authorized waste-picker collectives for fair-trade doorstep collection verified by digital weigh-scales. Rooftop Solar & Midday EV Nudges: Solar owners track bi-directional feeder exports, while EV drivers earn bonus multipliers for shifting charging to midday peak-solar windows (10:00 – 15:00), cutting fossil peaker-plant demand.
- Multimodal Commute & Carbon Verifier (Transit & EV) To nudge people out of their cars, we integrated the modern Google Maps Routes API (Route.computeRoutes). Users can select preset municipal transit and protected bike-lane corridors—or enter custom origins and destinations—to verify public transit, cycling, or walking routes. The platform renders the exact route polyline on the map, calculates the avoided compared to a solo-car baseline (0.24 kg CO2e/km), and awards EcoCredits immediately.
- Gamified Leaderboards & Local Municipal Rewards (Leaderboard & Rewards) Every verified action updates the user's real-time carbon savings ( ), daily streak, and EcoCredits balance. Citizens compete on a live city-wide and neighborhood leaderboard and redeem their EcoCredits in a local marketplace for 3-day municipal transit passes, 120-minute e-bike credits, $15 rooftop solar utility bill offsets, and farmers' market compost vouchers.
How We Architected VerdiLoop on AWS
- To support real-time telemetry verification and cross-device syncing without managing servers, we designed our cloud layer around AWS Open Source and AWS Serverless Services:
- AWS SDK for JavaScript v3: Our TypeScript service layer for modular, tree-shakable data operations paired with local edge caching.
- Amazon Cognito: Handles citizen Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication and identity group management (VerifiedUrbanCitizens) so users can sync their impact profile across devices.
- Amazon DynamoDB: Stores user carbon profiles , immutable activity ledgers , and reward voucher states with single-digit millisecond latency.
- AWS AppSync: Keeps neighborhood leaderboards and co-op digital weigh-scale handovers synchronized in real time.
- AWS IoT Core & AWS IoT Greengrass: Ingests verification payloads from smart optical segregation bins and municipal Material Recovery Facility (MRF) weighbridges.
- Amazon Timestream: Captures time-series clean energy export telemetry from neighborhood rooftop solar smart inverters.
- Amazon EventBridge & AWS Lambda: Orchestrates event-driven EV charger demand-response nudges, e-waste hazard manifest QR checks, route verification, and atomic municipal voucher issuance.
- Amazon API Gateway: Bridges municipal transit and bike-share dock feeds to validate car-free trips.
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