Carbon footprint monitoring

Shine can help brands monitor and meet their sustainability goals.

Problem:

Plastic waste is one of the major problems facing urban and rural India today. Plastic takes on an average over 5000 years to degrade, and no mechanism has been established to collect, recycle, and actively degrade plastic. Apart from the government body that seeks to remove and recycle plastic, there is a large group of waste workers/rag pickers, from the poorest sections of society, who collect wastes from city landfills, households, around the roads of the city, and give them to a waste aggregator. They get paid in small cash for this service. They are homeless, live on the streets, and depend on plastic collection as the main source of income. There are close to 30,000 rag pickers in Bangalore alone, and over a few million across the country. They constitute a large part of the poorest in urban India.

Solution:

Project Vitarana aims to improve the livelihood of the rag pickers by combining cutting edge technology and the existing rag picker network to empower rag pickers through providing them a “Carbon Credit” score by tracking what they recycle. The amount of plastic that is recycled by the rag pickers is recorded by waste collection centers. The identity of each rag picker is created by either a fingerprint or by using their aadhaar. Aadhaar creation companies can tie up with waste collection centers to offer the rag pickers an Aadhaar card. This Aadhaar card could then be used to create a bank account for the rag pickers, hence providing them with financial services and government benefit schemes for which they would have been un-eligible for earlier since there was no means of identification. This would also result in organisation of the waste collection market, which would in turn result in greater amount of consumer waste to be recycled. This data could then be shared with large brands who are mandated by the government to recycle waste.

Benefits to rag pickers:

● Providing an identification to rag pickers, hence solving for ID.

● “Carbon Credit” score for rag pickers.

● ID + score could result in Bank accounts + lending to rag pickers.

● ID + score could result in applicability of rag pickers to government schemes for healthcare, banking, insurance.

● Providing a potential stable income to rag pickers by organising the waste collection market.

Benefits to Government:

The government will be able to see how many rag pickers have been benefited from getting both an identification as well as a “Carbon Credit” score. They will be able to seamlessly transfer benefits directly to the rag pickers.

Benefit to Brands:

Brands will be able to use the large rag picker network to be able to fulfill their 30% waste quota, as well as creating a measurable social impact.

Benefit to lenders:

Now lenders will have a new market segment for business.

Implementation:

Currently we are engaged in a project with Saahas, which is an NGO, for enabling traceability of plastic waste from the waste collection center to the end recycling unit or incinerator unit. This traceability platform has been built on a Blockchain network, which enables storing accurate and tamperproof data. Using this as the base blockchain network, we will build a platform to:

● onboard rag pickers to share daily plastic collection data;

● to make it easy for them to associate their plastic data with their aadhaar which then associates with the “Carbon Credit” score;

● to enable micro-finance institutions and lending companies to enable opening of bank accounts and lending to rag pickers for them to have financial services and business opportunities.