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Type
Mobile App Development
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Sectors
Environmental, Sustainability
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Technologies
Ionic, Cordova, Angular, CodeIgniter, Firebase, PHP, MySQL
Rewarding users for recycling through clever tech
Imagined Earth introduced reverse vending machines (RVMs) into South Africa in 2015, allowing people to recycle their packaging waste through these really nifty machines. How cool is that?!
This was a great start to the recycling initiative and as avid recyclers ourselves, we loved being part of this project!
Through this clever initiative, Imagined Earth was able to engage much closer with the recycling community. How did we go about this you ask?
IT'S ALL ABOUT THE PRODUCTS
The solution to this was the development of the Imagined Earth Mobile App.
The mobile app motivates people to engage with Imagined Earth, encouraging users to recycle by making it a fun and engaging experience, whilst being rewarded for doing so.
Loads of features are part of the app, such as profile management, recycling news, product information and get notified of updates through push notifications.
What people recycle are products. Naturally, we want to educate people about the products they're recycling and provide some insightful information.
To help users quickly find out about a specific product, we added a barcode scanner, so that users can scan a product and find out whether it can be recycled, the volume, the material it's made of and who the manufacturer is.
Great, so now you know you can recycle the product, now what? Easy! At the click of a button, users can find the closest Reverse Vending Machines to them, with an accompanying map with directions to help the user find the device easily.
Other interesting information related to the products we provide the users insight into are, which brands and partners have the most recylced products, in the ecosystem.
MAKING RECYCLING FUN
The app also boasts the ability to track and report each and every recycle that you've performed.
A digital wallet allows users to see what their wallet balance is and how they've achieved this. Whether it’s through recycling loads of bottles of their favourite soft drink or through winning competitions and campaigns, it all adds to your wallet balance.
Not only that, but you can also link your profile to your favourite loyalty cards, allowing you to redeem your wallet balance.
These sorts of features really make the not-so-fun act of recycling a lot more rewarding, engaging and enjoyable. This really prompts people to go the extra mile and recycle more than they typically would have done so, which ultimately leads to less recycled products in the landfill and a better environment for all users.
It also makes users a lot more conscious of the impact that they are making and in turn they can influence their friends and family to join this fun eco system.
Do you need the services of a solid web development agency?
Companies around the world choose Elemental as their tech partner for the design and development of custom websites, web apps, software, and mobile apps. We work with businesses of all sizes, from agile startups to well-established enterprises, to bring their ideas to life. Let's discuss your vision and explore how we can turn it into reality.
BRINGING ALL THE TECH TOGETHER IS WHACK
Behind the mobile app, sits a whole stack of technology that is the driving force of the entire system. Each part of the stack is custom designed and developed to perform a certain function, allowing the platform to be scalable and flexible as the number of users grow and new features are rolled out.
Here's a high-level overview to give you some insight:
A full on back-end management platform allows Imagined Earth to manage data, view usage and create new competitions, campaigns, news articles, etc. An API (Application Programming Interface), is a clever piece of tech that sits between the mobile app and the backend platform and allows the two to communicate securely and quickly.
Lastly, Google Firebase is integrated into the entire system to track certain data but more importantly, it's used to send out push notifications to users.
Although this may all seem overly complex, it's structured in this manner as a best practice and also allows for future expansion quite nicely.
INTERESTING FACTS
Messaging the Imagined Earth community is super important to engage with them and keep them updated on their recycles, wins and other updates. A great benefit to using mobile apps over web based apps, is undoubtedly the ability to send push notifications to users which pop up on their mobile phones. This we achieved by integrating the mobile and the backend administrator platform with Google's Firebase. Over and above Push Notifications the system also has the ability to send emails, SMSes and MMSes to users who have not downloaded and installed the mobile app, allowing Imagined Earth to communicate with the users through various channels.
WE LOVE A GOOD CHALLENGE
We had challenges to get the location detection to work 100% accurately and consistently, when wanting to serve location based ads to the users based on their vicinity to the RVMs.
We opted to swop this out and build a management tool that allowed Imagined Earth to segement their users by recycling usage, profile information and demographic data, so that we could message these distinct types users accurately.
Do you need the services of a solid web development agency?
Companies around the world choose Elemental as their tech partner for the design and development of custom websites, web apps, software, and mobile apps. We work with businesses of all sizes, from agile startups to well-established enterprises, to bring their ideas to life. Let's discuss your vision and explore how we can turn it into reality.
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