Trash Rush • Concept 2025

A mobile game that teaches you how to sort trash

Two Trash Rush phone screens: the title screen over a pastel city, and a kitchen round asking where a plastic bottle goes, with four colored bins.
Role
UI/UX Designer, Illustration
Timeline
September to December 2025
Team
Linh Dinh, Yalu Ouyang, Brandon Hirano, Ryan Lee, Colin Sutedja, Regine Valdez
Tools
Figma, Nano Banana
Client
PlanetFlip
Of players in our feedback sessions enjoyed it
90%
In players' self-rated ability to sort waste after playing
+15%

Trash Rush is a phone game we made with the nonprofit PlanetFlip. It teaches young adults to sort the trash that recycling guides leave you guessing on. In feedback sessions, 90 percent of players enjoyed it.

I was the UI/UX designer on a team of seven. I designed the screens and drew the rooms and trash items.

Problem

San Diego's tools tell you what is recyclable. They do not teach you.

Lookup tools like the Waste Wizard answer one item at a time. They never teach you how to think about the ambiguous stuff, and that's where people get it wrong. We bet a soft game world could teach what a lookup tool cannot.

San Diego's Waste Wizard: a single text prompt asking you to name an item to see which bin to use.
Waste Wizard answers once per item, teaches nothing.

Process

I illustrated rooms that make learning feel soft, not stressful.

I illustrated the Kitchen and Bedroom in pastel with rounded shapes on purpose. People feel anxious about getting recycling wrong. A soft world lowers the stakes. Guessing wrong and trying again is how learning happens.

A grid of the game's pastel room and beach backgrounds, including the kitchen and bedroom.
Pastel, rounded rooms so guesses never feel like failure.

Process

Mom and the Janitor turn instructions into a conversation.

A game that only gives orders gets boring. So we added characters like Mom and the Janitor, who react to what you do.

With points, they give players a reason to come back. My teammate Linh drew them in Figma.

Four hand drawn Trash Rush characters on a green background, including Mom and the Janitor.
Characters by my teammate Linh Dinh react to your choices.

Final Design

One item, four bins, one room at a time.

Each round: one item in a room, one of four bins. A character reacts, points add up. The items are the gray-area things lookup tools answer once and nobody remembers.

One round: the question, a wrong guess, the right answer.

Reflection

The soft visuals weren't decoration. They kept people playing long enough to learn.

I thought the drawings were just polish. They were the teaching. Worried people only keep guessing when the stakes feel low.

Players rated their own sorting 15 percent higher. We aimed for 25, so we fell short. And feeling better isn't sorting better. Next time I'd test ten real items before and after.

The team's evaluation table with target and actual values: 90 percent approval against an 80 percent target for enjoyment, and a 15 percent increase against a 25 percent target for self rated sorting ability.
Our targets next to our results. Only learning fell short.