How Inner City Green Team Cut Weekly Recycling Data Entry From an Hour to Minutes With AI
Inner City Green Team is a New York City nonprofit that advances climate awareness and waste equity in public housing communities. Founded by Brigitte Charlton-Vicenty, a lifelong New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) resident, the organization provides door-to-door recycling collection, environmental education, and green jobs for NYCHA residents. Its work helps make recycling more accessible for residents, including seniors and people with limited mobility who may live far from recycling bins.
Because most of Inner City Green Team’s work happens in person within the buildings it serves, its records also lived on paper for years.
Inner City Green Team and Apparo!
From the MetLife Foundation Cohort to Tech Therapy
Inner City Green Team’s relationship with Apparo began through Apparo’s Technology Foundations Cohort sponsored by MetLife. You can read more about the cohort in Technology Foundations Cohort from Apparo & MetLife Wraps Up.
Brigitte, Founder of Inner City Green Team, joined looking for confirmation that the organization was on the right track, and for ways to do its work better and more efficiently.
The cohort experience stood out to her. “I really value my time, and I get a lot of emails asking me to participate in this and attend that,” Brigitte said. “Apparo’s sessions were very approachable and comprehensive, and they covered a good range of topics. I especially liked the cybersecurity workshop. Everyone had good questions, and it never felt daunting. I’m glad I did it.”
After the cohort ended, Inner City Green Team kept working with Apparo through its Tech Therapy® program, focusing on a challenge that ate up hours of staff time every week: getting handwritten records into usable data.
Turning Handwritten Recycling Logs Into Spreadsheets With Gemini AI
Each week, Inner City Green Team’s sorters weighed the recyclable materials collected from residents and wrote the weights down by hand in a spiral notebook. Every Friday, those pages were photographed and sent to Anabel Batista, Admin Assistant at Inner City Green Team, who typed every number into Google Sheets herself.
“We’re a small nonprofit, and there are always things to do,” Anabel explained. “Going from pen and paper into data was not a speedy process.”
Anabel brought the problem to Jennifer Ray, Director of Technology Engagements at Apparo. Jennifer suggested a simple fix using AI tools the team already had access to. “Jennifer very smartly told me we could use AI,” Anabel said. “I upload the image to Gemini, and Gemini puts it into a Google Sheet. Ever since then, it’s been very easy.”
The difference is dramatic. Depending on how much data came in, Anabel’s Friday data entry used to take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. Now it takes about five minutes on average, and never more than ten.
Jennifer also helped the team see what they could do next with that data. Once the weights live in a spreadsheet, Gemini can help spot trends in the types and amounts of materials collected, with no manual adding up of columns and rows. Those trends can then support other work, like grant writing.
Cleaner Recycling Data, Fewer Clipboards, and More Time for Grant Writing
The time savings came with better accuracy, too. “I’m getting cleaner data. Not having to decipher handwriting is very helpful,” Anabel said.
The shift away from paper has reached the collectors as well. They used to carry printed sheets on clipboards each week, listing every building and every enrolled apartment, and check off boxes as they made their rounds. The sheets had to be printed every week, and they sometimes got lost or turned up in the recycling bags. As part of this broader move away from paper, the Inner City Green Team staff came up with a QR code idea, and Anabel created it. Now, collectors simply scan the code on their phones and enter the building and apartment number into a form.
“I always knew it had to get better, it had to be more efficient,” Brigitte said. “I don’t get any complaints anymore about the clipboard. It’s one less thing to worry about every week.”
For a small team, those minutes matter. “A huge percent of what we do is grant writing,” Brigitte explained. “Those minutes add up. When we have a deadline, we can focus on it. Those little time savers let us focus on the things that keep us in business.” Every hour that doesn’t go into data entry or paperwork is an hour that can go toward funding, growing, and sustaining Inner City Green Team’s recycling service for NYCHA residents.
“Jennifer is amazing. It’s straight talk, no chaser,” Brigitte said. “We’ve forged a good relationship with Apparo that I’m looking forward to building on.“
