Two Malaysian teams came up with winning ideas to address climate and environmental issues at the Climate Hack 2021 hackathon
OVER the past decade, the world has witnessed rapid technological advancements that transformed our way of life.
Now, from climate change to the Covid-19 pandemic, the world is facing unprecedented crises that demand a holistic approach and international cooperation to resolve.
At the recent Climate Hack 2021, the ideas from two Malaysian teams — WasteBuster and MahaEnergy — came out as two of the four winning ones in the competition, which saw 500 participants from 16 countries in Asia sending in 46 digital prototypes.
The event, organised by the Singapore International Foundation and social enterprise Code For Asia, leverages technology and international networks to empower participants to brainstorm online and develop solutions for climate change issues.
MAKING RECYCLING SIMPLE
Of the 46 prototypes, Malaysian team WasteBuster's idea of making recycling easier via a mobile app called Raccoonia caught the judges' attention.
Team leader Yudhishthra Sugumaran said Raccoonia is a mobile application that digitalises recycling to simplify the process by connecting communities and businesses to local recyclers, while offering exciting rewards like cash and vouchers for active contributors.
"The app uses artificial intelligence to eliminate the need for the average Malaysian to find a recycler to recycle their waste.
"All they need to do is just scan the waste that they want to recycle, and they will be directed to the nearest recycler based on their location," he said.
Users may then key in a schedule for collection and the recycler will come and collect their waste at the agreed time and location.
This saves time, energy and money for people as they don't need to go all the way to recycling centres just to recycle their waste.
To make it interesting and meaningful for people who recycle, the app features gamified badges and a leaderboard system.
"Users are recognised according to their contributions, and they can earn bragging rights. The contribution summary provides data on the amount of greenhouse gas emissions reduced, energy saved, the quantity of waste diverted from landfills, and money saved," said Yudhishthra.
Nearby community meet-ups and has a forum to foster a community spirit for people to encourage each other to recycle.
Just like how Grab started out by connecting consumers who needed on-demand ride-hailing to drivers, Yudhishthra said Raccoonia connects an existing pool of recyclers in Malaysia to people who want to recycle from the convenience of their own homes.
For example, plastics are a resource-intensive material to produce as they are made of fossil fuel. They are not only non-renewable, but also produce a tremendous level of greenhouse gases.
There are not many facilities or recyclers that collect plastic, making it less convenient for the public to recycle the material.
"Raccoonia fills this gap by connecting the relevant recyclers directly to the user to facilitate collection without hassle. Through this, we hope to increase the lifespan of single-use plastics and eventually work towards a sustainable way of living," he explained.
AN IDEA IS BORN
Yudhishthra said the idea for Raccoonia came after he noticed a huge amount of waste that was generated and dumped daily, destroying wildlife and damaging the environment.
"We do not realise that a single-use plastic that takes thousands of years to decompose is often thrown away in a blip.
"We also noticed the blood, sweat and tears of the familiar paper
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man and other waste collectors — the hard work they put in by driving around the neighbourhood just for small gains, and this being their only source of income," he said.
It is evident that societal awareness of recycling is still low despite the presence of these waste recyclers for a long time, and this has affected their revenue stream too.
"This is mainly because those recyclers only accepted certain types of materials and residents are not aware of their schedules. So, these factors have hindered the recycling process," he added.
To address these problems, Raccoonia is created to connect the existing pool of recyclers to communities by digitising the recycling industry.
"By bridging this gap, it is now possible for waste to be recycled in an on-demand basis and alleviate the residents' concerns in approaching the right recycler to recycle their waste.
"The series of panel discussions and workshops that were organised by Climate Hack 2021 also provided us with fresh perspectives on the current climate crisis.
"This helps us to shape the context of our problem statement and ensure that it is relevant to the issues faced today," said Yudhishthra.
INDUSTRY COLLABORATION
To make the system work smoothly, Yudhishthra said his team aimed to collaborate with local recyclers so they could diversify the types of waste that could be recycled.
"Through this, we hope to mobilise most of the local recyclers and provide a steady stream of revenue for them.
"With the community feature, we hope that the average Malaysian will be interested in joining community meet-ups near them to do recycling-related activities, or even join forums in-app to participate in discussions revolving around small steps that can be taken to recycle or save the environment," he said.
"From my observation, youths today are participating actively in advocating for the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.
"Hence, we are targeting the youth to be Raccoonia's beta users for critical and honest feedback. From there, we can then move forward with people from other age groups to gauge their enthusiasm for the app," he added.
This data will then be used to improve Raccoonia's features to ensure that it inspires a bigger recycling movement in Malaysia and motivates people to do their part.
HARNESSING SOLAR POWER
Another team that emerged as a winner from Malaysia is the MarhaEnergy Team, who came up with the idea of democratising access to solar energy through economies of scale.
Team leader Julian Theseira said the MarhaEnergy platform enables residential users to pool resources to install solar panels in their neighbourhoods by connecting them to solar panel suppliers and service providers.
"The platform works in addressing climate change by enabling increased adoption and utilisation of solar energy by residential consumers in Malaysia. This will help Malaysia achieve its energy transition goals," he said.
Increased usage of renewable energy, including solar energy, will enable Malaysia to reduce its carbon emissions, thereby contributing towards the mitigation of climate change.
This will also increase the country's resilience in line with climate-neutral urban planning. The high population density in urban areas has resulted in higher market potential and demand for community-based solar projects.
"In suburban areas, the platform can also be adapted to decentralise energy supply and reduce dependency on electricity generated by the combustion of fossil fuels, eventually increasing climate resilience in remote residential areas," explained Julian.
CREATING THE PLATFORM
Team member Lucy Wong Zi Ni said the team used the "Design Thinking" process to develop the platform.
"We started by brainstorming environmental problems to solve and prioritised issues based on potential impact and tractability of solutions.
"Once we decided to work on renewable energy to mitigate climate change, we did a 'Crazy 8s' ideation exercise to generate potential solution ideas.
"We prioritised solution ideas based on the hackathon judging criteria, impact, entrepreneurship, innovation and X-factor," said Wong.
Besides that, the team also did research to understand the renewable energy market in Malaysia and how our solution could fill a gap in the commercial solar marketplace.
"We discovered that Malaysia has a low residential solar adoption rate even though as a tropical country, it receives abundant sunshine.
"We then interviewed potential users to understand their pain points with regard to installing solar panels on their homes to further refine our solution, and ensure it met the users' needs," said Julian.
"We discovered, for instance, that an obstacle hindering residential consumers from installing solar panels on their homes was the lack of assured maintenance of solar panels after installation.
"Hence the platform we prototyped will also connect residential consumers with solar panel maintainers," he said.
FUTURE PLANS
Julian said the solution still needs to be refined for it to be translated into a full-scale product and brought into the market.
"Our team envisions the platform to be web-based with a mobile version.
"We decided against building an app because of app fatigue among users. However, if there is user demand for an app, then one can also be built.
"We are considering several possibilities for refining our solution and turning it into a product, such as by participating in social entrepreneur development or start-up incubator programmes," he said.