In an attempt to tackle the social aspect of the challenge, we felt it would be important to get the community more involved in global responsibility by encouraging them to do their part in making our planet a better place through recycling.
Plastic and paper are among the most common items, constantly being used by people on a daily basis, that can be easily recycled though in order to get the community more involved, we felt that a reward system would encourage the people to embrace their role in global responsibility.
About one trillion plastic bags are used across the globe and more than a billion plastic straws are used everyday with over 150 million tonnes polluting the ocean. It is believed that public negligence has been the main cause with over 80% of marine litter coming from poorly recycled household waste dumped in landfills or waste abandoned in nature and in order to help in mitigating this issue, we decided that people would be more responsible in dealing with waste if it were to their immediate benefit.
The point system would work by creating magic bins in which a specific recyclable item would be placed particularly an item that can easily be recycled in its specific area like paper only or water bottles only or glass bottles only. These bins will have a counter that calculates how many items have been added via weight and the counter will display a code that will be scanned on a mobile device through an app allowing you to keep track of the specific amount of waste you’ve recycled in weight. For every predetermined amount for example, 2kg, a certain number of points will be awarded, and these points can be used through agreements with stores for discounts on items. During certain weeks, special rewards will be announced for whoever recycles the most within a that same week introducing a competitive element to it. This is intended to start of small with a specific item to recycle rather than everything and expand to more items as later on as more ways to recycle items within the community are introduced.
A way to identify what items need to be recycled would be by collaborating with city companies and looking through the products they make then seeing how some of them can be remade using recycled material and encouraging the general public to recycle these specific items in the magic bins. This way we hope to encourage collaboration between companies and their respective communities to embrace global responsibility.
Hi,
Another team member passing by here.
I was very much intrigued by your concept here. However, I do have a few suggestions that you might want to take into account when working on the final submission.
The fairness of the system:
How will you ensure that the counter is not falsely modified for the given benefits to retrieved.
The motivation behind the discount system:
What are the motivational aspects to the system and why do you think the companies mentioned will be interested providing the presumable large user base with these sorts of discounts. For any positive (environmentally) policy there is a positive externality associated with it, however, I suggest you do more extensive analysis of the cost of much system and the benefits it will bring. Will the users be willing to spend more for it?
Best of luck!
Hi Tarique
I like the incentive driven recycling community you have outlined.
I would suggest doing some cost estimation of such an infrastructure and how much you get in return. We need to ensure that the system is feasible financially, as well as ecologically - for example the carbon released in deploying the infrastructure must not exceed what is offset by recycling.
I also like the fact that you point to locality of recycling - this is an ongoing issue as countries off load their recycling to other countries and mark the items as recycled but the recipient country may not be as diligent as claimed on paper. There are piles of electrical items in African countries just going into landfill as an example.
I would think that the private consumer using a roadside bin is not only a small contributor as compared to corporates,, the materials will be extremely varying and the quality of recyclable material (contamination etc) will be poor. It would be perhaps more efficient to target larger operations like corporates, municipal operations, etc who will have much higher weight of materials and more consistency, These companies will do whatever costs lowest so the incentives and points should make sure its always more financially sensible for them to do the right thing.
In summary, I would try to do some high level 'balance sheets' of what your system costs both financially and ecologically vs what it gains in order to validate the idea
Tavish