CellBack

About CellBack

What Inspired Us

Battery waste is often treated as an ordinary household waste problem, but a used battery can contain materials that are harmful when improperly disposed of. The problem we noticed was not only recycling, but the lack of a convenient and traceable way to get used batteries from households to the right collection channels.

We asked a simple question: Why can't the place where people buy everyday essentials also become the place where they return everyday waste?

That led to CellBack — a hyperlocal battery-waste collection network that uses neighbourhood kirana stores as collection points, bringing responsible disposal closer to people while creating incentives for participation.

What We Built

CellBack connects three key stakeholders:

Consumers → Kirana Stores → Authorized Recyclers

Consumers can drop their used batteries at nearby participating kirana stores. Each collection is tracked through a QR-based system, creating a digital trail for battery waste and supporting Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) compliance.

To encourage participation, our model introduces cashback/reward incentives, turning battery disposal from a chore into a mutually beneficial activity.

The system is designed around three principles:

Accessibility: Use existing neighbourhood stores instead of creating an entirely new collection infrastructure.

Traceability: Digitally track collections from the point of drop-off.

Incentivization: Reward responsible disposal to encourage repeat participation.

How We Built It

We approached CellBack as a B2B2C circular-economy platform rather than simply building a recycling app.

The solution consists of a digital platform for user interaction, QR-based collection tracking, stakeholder management and incentive mechanisms. The physical layer uses existing kirana-store infrastructure as decentralized collection points, while recyclers provide the downstream processing channel.

The workflow is:

[ \text{Consumer} \rightarrow \text{Kirana Collection Point} \rightarrow \text{QR Tracking} \rightarrow \text{Recycler} ]

This combination of a digital tracking layer with an existing physical retail network allows the model to scale without requiring a completely new collection infrastructure.

What We Learned

The biggest lesson was that solving a sustainability problem is not only about creating the correct environmental solution — it is about designing behaviour around it.

We learned that asking people to “recycle responsibly” is often not enough. Convenience, trust and incentives can determine whether people actually participate.

We also learned to think beyond the application itself. CellBack required us to consider stakeholder incentives, reverse logistics, EPR traceability, collection economics and scalability together rather than treating them as separate problems.

Challenges We Faced

One of our biggest challenges was designing a system that could make battery collection both convenient for consumers and viable for collection partners.

We also had to think about:

How to create enough collection density for users to participate conveniently.

How to maintain traceability once batteries enter the physical collection network.

How to align incentives between consumers, kirana stores and recyclers.

How to prevent the platform from becoming just another waste-reporting application.

How to design a model that can expand from a small local network to a larger city-wide ecosystem.

These challenges shaped CellBack into a hyperlocal circular collection network rather than simply a battery-waste marketplace or awareness platform.

Our Vision

CellBack aims to make responsible battery disposal as easy as buying something from your neighbourhood store.

By combining existing local infrastructure, digital traceability and behavioural incentives, we envision a scalable network that can bring battery waste into a more organized and accountable circular economy.