What motivated you to develop the KOLEKT app? During my time in Bali, I came to witness the huge waste problem there. Not only many foreigners like me, but also schools, businesses, hotels, and restaurants have problems disposing of their waste properly. In countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, Brazil, and many others, you only have about four waste collectors for every 1,000 inhabitants. With their motorcycles and carts, they are constantly on the lookout for valuable recyclables on the streets. Many of them often waste a lot of time and fuel in the process. In the end, the Indonesian cab system inspired me to get together with waste pickers to tackle the problem. How did you develop the app? In fact, I offered coffee and cigarettes to a waste collector and his colleagues to ask him if he would be interested in helping me develop a waste collection app similar to the taxi app. So, we worked together on designs for five days, and a month later I had developed a first pilot version of the app, which he was not at all happy with and complained about its various shortcomings. This feedback turned out to be very helpful. Just to give one example: the waste collectors’ smartphones often don’t work very well because their cameras have a lower image resolution, for instance. In addition, the screen is not very easy to read due to the strong sunlight, which is why you need appropriate contrast to read the letters. In addition, many collectors only have limited Internet data plans, while others have only simple cellphones or even no phone at all. All of this needs to be carefully considered. So, the basic requirement for KOLEKT was that it needed to be usable by people who have neither a phone nor a bank account and who often have to work offline. It’s all about the lowest common denominator. The app is designed to be very simple, no instruction manual needed, and with very little text, and it works in Arabic, Portuguese, Vietnamese, and Indonesian. What exactly is the idea behind the app? A very important point is that apps, especially for waste picking, will only be truly used if the user gets any added financial value out of it because waste pickers know exactly what they are doing and do not need any technical support to do their work. They have their own networks and know the dealers and their prices to whom they can sell the waste they’ve collected. However, the ability to compare purchase prices given by different buyers makes an app interesting and drives price competition. Then you also have the multinational consumer goods companies who have to prove that they have collected and disposed of a certain amount of plastic. And if enterprises, such as Tetrapak in our case, are interested in having less-valuable materials collected, they need appropriate collection incentives for such low-value waste. In order to grant a low-value waste subsidy, you must ensure that you can pay a large number of people who have neither a bank account nor a cellphone. This is where KOLEKT comes into play. KOLEKT caters to all three needs. Firstly, by providing a marketplace for the recyclables trade, secondly, by monitoring and offering proof to companies of where Thierry Sanders, managing director of Circular Action B.v., about KOLEKT INTERVIEW 42
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