Building a Transparent Plastic Credits Ecosystem with Blockchain.
EcoCreds merges sustainability with blockchain to formalize the highly unregulated global plastic credits market to make it accountable, transparent and decentralized.
emerging market
backed by polygon
Overview
Plastic recycling is an opaque unregulated industry, EcoCreds wanted to change this.
With an extremely ambitious mission of organizing the global plastic credit system, EcoCreds wanted to fuse blockchain's decentralized transparency, with the loosely regulated plastic recycling and credit issuance ecosystems. The founding team had a deep on-ground knowledge and a collective experience of over 20 years.
My Role
Lead Product Designer
Interface
Mobile App
Responsive Webapp
Website
Duration
3 months
Tools
Tasks I Owned
Problem
Without on-ground transparency, recycling turns into an unaccountable credit system built on blind trust.
Constraints
opportunity
How might we empower recycling partners to easily document their work, stage by stage, and build trust through blockchain-backed transparency?
goals
We set the following project goals
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Understand the Industry — Conduct in-depth research through reports, competitor analysis, publications, and conversations with domain experts.
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Design the Product Ecosystem — Iteratively develop product flows for the consumer-facing marketplace and backend partner apps, unified by a cohesive design system.
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Launch the MVP — Deliver a marketplace web app, partner app (mobile-first) integrated with blockchain, waitlist landing page, and product whitepaper, starting with plastic credits and later expanding to e-waste, cloth, and carbon credits.
research
After 2 weeks of immersive research we identified the key stages, touch-points and middlemen in the plastic recycling process in developing economies like India, Brazil, Indonesia, Vietnam.
Here's how we compiled our research onto a Figjam board
Research Insights
project scope
Here's the scope we defined for the MVP:
Consumer Marketplace: Aimed at consumers (corporates and businesses) to purchase credits via aggregating multiple plastic creditors and clearly outlining key plastic parameters and authenticity with the following flow:
Partner Apps: To ensure granular on-ground data collection, we needed 2 applications to serve 2 types of users:
Facility Manager Application (Mobile first): an application for on-ground workers to input data at every stage (collection, processing, delivery) which would need to be verified by the parent waste management organiser before forever logging on the blockchain for each credit.
Waste Manager Dashboard (Web-based): a holistic dashboard aggregating multiple facility data for managers to review, approve and issue plastic credit certificates as well as manage their marketplace inventory.
Landing Page & Business Materials: Building an early waitlist collection landing page with the product vision and business materials like pitch-decks, and whitepapers.
3 is out of the scope of this case-study primarily due to my level of involvement vs 1,2
design process
Unique Credit Certificates
An important problem we wanted to solve was ensuring credit authenticity and increasing credit desirability ie; presenting certificates which instantly communicated their purpose and could be shared. For this purpose we created 'Global Plastic Offset Standard' or GPOS which defined each credit to be equivalent to 1000 metric kilos of plastic recovered from the open environment and processed.
Transparent 'Detail Page'
Each stage of generating the credit is displayed in a step by step timeline breakdown with verifiable on-chain proofs recorded by on-ground staff.
Empowering Granular Data Collection at Facilities
Special emphasis was made to design a clean, fast, mobile-first web application that allowed facility managers to log every critical step in the plastic treatment process. With the use of distinct colors, icons, direct imagery, and bold context headings we reduced the learning-curve for users.
Robust Dashboard for Credit Issuers
For the credit issuing waste management organisations (WMOs) we built a dashboard with smart widgets that clustered relevant data. The key functions of this included managing credit inventory, tracking sales, and monitoring facility operations (users, plastic data).
Outcome
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MVP shipped within timeline industry-leading Partner App UX
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