Asia-Pacific Sustainability Action Awards-Sustainability Action Awards SDG09:Bronze
National Formosa University
AI Vision for a Plastic-Free Flower Market: Data-Driven Plastic Reduction in Taipei
Taipei's Jianguo Holiday Flower Market draws tens of thousands of weekend visitors, yet the plastic-free market policy of the Ministry of Environment and Taipei City long lacked objective data to measure behavioral change. Launched in 2025 as a public-private partnership, it promotes the "Three Eco-Bags." Starting in 2026, this project deploys an AI-based offline video analytics system at both exits to quantify foot traffic and bag-use behavior; setup, evaluation, and validation ran from January to May 2026. A dual-model YOLO ensemble with ByteTrack tracking and human- object interaction recognition counts visitors and classifies bags as plastic, paper, or reusable, and detects cart use. A self-built dataset, labeled via a SAM3 and GroundingDINO pipeline, fills the plastic-bag gap absent from standard models. All analysis runs offline with mosaic-based face anonymization for privacy-friendly governance. Monthly weekend sampling from June to December 2026 builds a long-term baseline of bag-use rates for evidence-based policy evaluation. With low- cost cameras and a replicable workflow, the model can scale to markets across Taiwan and Asia- Pacific cities, advancing SDGs 9, 11 and 12.