Waste management remains one of the biggest problems in my country. According to statistics, more than 90% of all municipal solid waste is disposed into landfill sites, with only 5-7% being recycled.

The most common way of managing waste practice over here is polygon waste disposal. That means that waste is buried in the land, polluting underwaters and disrupting local ecosystems.

A number of private companies in the countries where recycling is not nationalized accept waste. Thanks to that, people indifferent to the environmental issues can seize the opportunity and start recycling. To implement this practice into people’s daily routine, I have created an app which can raise people’s interest in recycling, help them manage waste in their households and educate them on the principles of recycling.

User research

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I have initiated a few user interviews to find out the level of people’s awareness about the recycling principles and their general attitude to recycling.

The questions that were conducted in the interview were the following:

• Do you recycle? If you don’t - would you like to?
• What could motivate you to start recycling?
• How well do you know the principles of recycling?
• How many recycling centres near your home do you know about? Do you know which types of waste they accept?

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Results

• 5 out of 6 people don’t recycle.
• 5 out of 6 people would like to start recycling. The person who answered they don’t want to start recycling said the reason for for it is that there is no unified, government-ruled waste management system.
• 5 out of 6 people knew the basics of waste management but didn’t have a sufficiently wide knowledge. Only one person claimed they are well aware of the rules of recycling.
• 3 out of 6 people didn’t know where nearby recycling points are.
• 4 out of 6 people said a rewarding system would motivate them to start recycling.

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I incorporated the insights gained from the conducted survey into the user persona.

Now that I knew what my user is like, I decided to create a customer journey map to understand the chronological steps a user might go through. It helped me to empathize with the user, focusing more on their needs.

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Competitive analysis

To proceed with gathering insights and seeking for inspiration for the future work, I have analysed several recycling apps from App Store. My analysis focused on the functionality of the apps and the users’ feedback on the apps. I wanted to learn how others troubleshoot the same issues that I was facing while designing my application.

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💡 Notifying the user about the oncoming pick-up is a good feature yet isn’t suitable for my app since public services in my country do not provide this kind of service.

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Now that I had done the research, I was ready to put my initial ideas on paper. Paper wireframing helps me to visualise my approach to solving the user’s needs.

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While I was browsing how other people approach their take on the reward system how other people approach the problem of rewarding the users who recycle, I realized that the ideas they introduced have a major flaw. The idea that many researchers introducing is to scan the bar code of an item you want to recycle and receive a money refund. However, this method is ineffective as users can simply scan an item and receive a refund and then proceed to throw the item that should be recycled in the bin.‍

💡 The solution that I came up with is to provide a catalogue of stores that offer a reward for bringing items to be recycled. The catalogue contains all the necessary information about all the recycling points including the address and information on the type of a reward they receive.

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Click on the image to open the prototype.

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I would love to transform the project into a full-fledged social media where people could share their experiences and contribute the solving of the waste management problem in my country. I would implement a rating system for recycling points and implement a comment section for article pages.

After all, I hope the existence of Greenify would raise interest in the problem of waste management in my homeland. As I have mentioned before, only private companies are now interested in recycling across the country but increasing the significance of the government’s role in waste management could speed up its implementation into daily lives. The product I developed, in that case, would make it simple for people to get into the habit of recycling.