MoneyPlastics

Building the Next Economic Frontier

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Inspiration

It happened when we visited a friend who lives in the slums of Tudor, Mombasa County. On enquiring what they do for a living, his response was “Nothing much, just occasional fishing which we do but on small scale, because there is a lot of plastic waste in the waters” There and then we realized when we solve the problem of marine plastic waste, we would be able to open up paths for income-generating activities along the coastline, and beyond.

What it does

Our system can collect data on types of plastic waste, the size of the plastic, the use of plastic, and the velocity of plastic waste produced. Using machine learning to analyze this data we find optimal policy and behavioral solutions. For instance, after data analysis we find that cooking fat containers produce 30% of plastic waste in slums. We propose a behavioral solution that encourages people to use a reusable container to store cooking fat, or we can have a policy solution by lobbying cooking fat manufacturers to pack their products in non-plastic material. Using data of plastic waste production velocity in slums, we send alerts to youth on those specific days to collect the waste and sell to make money. Saving them time and making sure they earn a respectable amount of money. As motivation, the system award virtual points to those who post waste heaps along the beaches which provides extra income to fishermen and beach guides who spend most of their time in those areas. These virtual coins can be redeemed to cash.

How we built it

It is in the form of a web application, a combination of multiple expertise like Front end - This accepts user data, show user earnings and get notified Backend - Contains the logic needed to perform all functions of the application ML - We use tree decision tree method to train models that predict volume of waste,. Big data - A lot of different forms of data captured, analyzed and provides insights. Integration - Marrying all the above technologies to come up with an end product that is efficient, effective and simple to interact with and understand.

Challenges we ran into

Technology: It was challenging to find the exact expertise needed to accomplish what we had in mind. Any implementation required hours of learning and practice. Public morale: Finding people to go collect marine waste seems a challenge in that a person needs assurance that their time will be well compensated. Massive awareness is still necessary to sensitize the youth on the importance of creating wealth from plastic waste.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. Adoption: Many coastal people are starting to embrace technology as a means of both solving marine waste and creating wealth.
  2. Clean Beaches: Beaches are starting to appear litter-free, an excellent advantage to the tourism industry since clean beaches attract tourists.
  3. Economy improvement: One of our most proud moments is a success story from one of the slum dwellers. He adopted our technology and through it has been able to move up the social ladder financially, and even moved from the slum

What we learned

A good technology solution should be user-oriented first, even so, a lot of awareness is needed to make it accepted even by laymen

What's next for MoneyPlastics

Going global. Our 5-year plan is to see MoneyPlastics being used all over Africa to benefit local people in terms of cleaning their beaches, and wealth from waste, and boosting the tourism industry.

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