Engineering Environmental Legislative-Guided LLM to Support Waste Management Learning

This study presents Waste Genie+, an AI-infused web-based educational technology to improve sustainability awareness and waste management skills. Waste Genie+ uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to transform complex environmental regulations and waste management information into accessible and digestible content. The platform features AI-infused content, interactive quizzes, and various sustainability awareness simulations. We utilized LLM chain-of-thought reasoning to implement a systematic prompt-based evaluation of the decomposed legislative content quality. Following the content and intelligent agent evaluation, a 10-day user study with 10 participants was designed and conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of Waste Genie+ in improving users' understanding of waste management practices and regulations. Results demonstrated that our Environmental Legislative-guided LLM successfully extracted coherent, highly readable content while preserving the original legal information. The user study uncovered significant improvement in the participants' waste management skills. It also revealed that users found that the quizzes were engaging and the AI-generated bite-sized content was more digestible and easier to understand compared to the original bills or articles. These findings contributed to our understanding of how AI-enhanced educational technologies can promote environmental stewardship and facilitate public awareness of sustainability practices and policies.