(re)store (Sustainability)

Environment & Sustainability - Encouraging eco-consumption

Our Earth deserves to be an important user or stakeholder in every problem that we're trying to solve! But we know not everyone has her at their top of mind, and our team hopes to find simple, insightful, and fun ways to make that happen 🤗💚🤪

Team members:

Christopher Demario Sastropranoto, Data Scientist
Elizabeth Heng, Product Design
Chandra Suryadevara, PM
Joycelyn Chua, Product Design

Problem Statement

The Earth - a key stakeholder of our world - is facing a big problem — with the online world being ever increasingly convenient, attractive, everywhere, and often thought as the way to go. But digital isn’t all that digital. Take online shopping for example: There’s significant eco impact from hosting online shops, packaging, logistics, delivery, to the creation and disposal of devices we use. While the booming e-commerce industry in Singapore may seem great for our economy, it’s worrying for our environment 😢🥲 A zero-waste life is ideal but our team knows it’s not easy, so our team hopes to start by reducing the eco impact of people’s online shopping habits 💪🏽

From our research, people’s key considerations when shopping online seem to be price, quality, and speed and ease of receiving the item, even if they’re eco-conscious. Eco-products are often of quality but at higher price (no economies of scale); faster and door-step delivery are often have more eco impact too. Other thoughts that users shared include: eco footprint just wasn’t salient in their mind; unsure of eco-claims reliability; eco footprint information wasn’t relatable; used to shopping on platforms like Shopee and Lazada and “already have the app on my phone”; and a general perception that eco-products are more expensive.

Proposed Solution

A bot/web extension that i) notifies users instantly when it detects or finds eco alternatives for what users are considering to buy online and ii) provides bite-size details on each eco alternative (e.g. price, eco-footprint written more relatably, delivery time). The bite-size details includes a link to our website, which shows more information about each eco alternative. When users buy an eco alternative, they earn rewards/cashback, and we’ll help them see the cumulative impact that they’re making for the world 💚 Our website also serves as a platform that aggregates listings of eco-products by lifestyle categories (e.g. Kitchen, Food, Kids). Products in our website and database will either have at least one reliable/established eco-certification or be “obviously” eco — like a natural soap bar, bamboo toothbrush, or a pre-loved item!

A key part of our solution is our partnerships with online shopping platforms and merchants, as they’re currently embedded in online shopper’s habits. Platforms/Merchants who are keen to be our partner will have their eco-products as part of our eco-products database — the place from which we identify eco alternatives to show users when they’re shopping online. While the products on these platforms/merchants may not all be eco, our north star is to nudge them towards being greener and wanting to offer greener alternatives in their business! For a start, our website links out to the platform/merchant where users can buy the eco-product (while we monitor if there’s strong reason/demand to let users to buy via our site).