Duo Rewards

DuoRewards brings recycling to the forefront of consumers minds as they shop, with the incentives and information they need to recycle better - driven by their own purchasing habits.

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Inspiration

Who doesn't want to be better at recycling, yet usually finds themselves frustrated?! We knew there was a plethora of information out there, however whenever we had a specific product we wanted to recycle we found it quite cumbersome to have to identify the right disposal method for each component. To add to that, a lot of the times we just weren't 100% sure what material it was to be able to confidently determine the right method. During our research we came across the Australasian Recycling Label scheme, and started brainstorming how we might bring this closer to more people, as it is not a mandatory labelling requirement under the Australian Food Standards (and it probably should be!).

What it does

Our solution is to drive purchasing behaviours that would help make recycling easier. We wanted to do this by leveraging the existing data analytics provided by the Woolworths Everyday Rewards app (a consumer loyalty and rewards app), and integrating an algorithm that categorises products based on its ARL. So that the rewards app could deliver personalised offers to increase preference for products with the ARL.

How we built it

An MVP UI on Figma and a skeleton algorithm with Python, Selenium and Tensorflow.

Challenges we ran into

It took us quite a while (and lots of research) later to finally realise what we actually wanted to try and solve. There were some technical challenges we were not able to overcome in the time that we had, especially as we lost 2 team members along the way. As we were all based in different parts of the world, trying to find a time that suited everyone was particularly hard, much less work side-by-side to overcome those challenges.

Accomplishments that we're proud of & What we learned

Though we came up a little short on our technical delivery, we are very proud of the solution we are proposing, and genuinely believe that it has real world potential.

Additionally, we all learnt something new - using a new platform, web scraping, building high fidelity prototypes and so on.

What's next for Duo Rewards

We wonder whether Woolworths (and their main competitor Coles) had actually thought of, or been approached to implement something similar, but for commercial/political/other reasons had decided to make a distinction between their rewards app and environmental initiatives. It may be worth looking into, as we did come across some Government grants to support innovation in this space.

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