Abstract
As a little girl, my favorite holiday was Earth Day. This deep appreciation for the natural world only sharpened after being immersed in the beautiful wildlife of Virginia while at university. Yet, I also found myself surrounded by students and faculty focused on technological advancement, a pursuit that, without careful stewardship, risks accelerating the very environmental concerns I have grown to care about. My capstone project addressed this tension through physical means in the design and construction of a miniaturized waste collection robot for the American Society for Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Student Design Competition. My STS research introduced a deeper understanding of a less visible barrier to practical sustainability by examining how corporate sustainability reporting tactics in smartwatches deprive consumers of true environmental comprehension. Together, my projects reveal a two-fold approach to reducing environmental harm: ensuring consumers have the ability to choose products that produce less harm to the environment, and implementing effective technologies into communities that ensure said products are properly collected, sorted, and processed.
The technical portion of my thesis, completed with my six-member group, produced OSCAR–a compact, sub 4”x5”x6” remote-controlled waste collection robot. The goal of OSCAR’s design was to address the need for versatile, adaptive waste collection solutions where infrastructure is limited. OSCAR can navigate a constrained model city with varied terrain, collect waste from road-side bins, and transport it safely to a dumpsite. A major focus of our design was balancing speed, maneuverability, and reliability within strict ASME size and power constraints. To do so, we used a holonomic mecanum wheel drivetrain for precise movement over uneven ground and in tight spaces, a bevel gear-driven grabber that transitions from grabbing to lifting with a single motor, and a scissor-lift dumping system that combines lifting and release into one motion. After much iteration, these choices let us strip the system down to what actually mattered: keeping OSCAR small while still meeting the demand for fast, effective, and reliable waste handling.
My STS research paper shows that corporate sustainability is far less clear than it initially appears. What began the semester prior as a focus on ambiguous definitions of sustainability, shifted toward how this sustainability is actually communicated to consumers. Through a comparison of Apple and Google’s product-level smartwatch reporting, I analyzed the environmental claims, along with the wording and structure of how that information is presented, and organized it into categories to make comparisons possible. The results show that discerning differences in environmental impact is a labor-intensive activity due to inconsistent definitions and reporting methods. Even when data is available, it is often buried, fragmented, or structured in ways that make interpretation difficult for the consumer. Ultimately, my research paper suggests that current sustainability reporting guidelines limit how consumers engage with, and eventually act on, environmental information. In practice, companies have control over what consumers can realistically understand, and without stronger standardization, that gap will likely continue to grow.
Both of these projects reminded me of why I chose to study engineering in the first place: wanting to address real problems and improve people’s lives. Since my STS research focused on consumer interaction with sustainability, an issue my technical project also tried to address, I was able to better see the connection between how technical systems operate and how they are understood by users. Engineering decisions, from initial design to final implementation, are not just technical choices but also shape how well solutions actually work in the communities they aim to serve. It would be naive to believe waste management and environmental responsibility are solved by my two projects alone, but combining both perspectives is a step towards more responsible engineering that better serves communities, which I hope will one day lead to a solution.
