plantey

Cover image
Available on Android and iOS.
Complete daily sustainable tasks.
Track your sustainable journey.
Join and complete community challenges.
The impact of your action will be amplified by businesses.
More functions to come :)

Why?

We as individuals care deeply about the future of our planet. But as much as we hope to contribute to a sustainable world, there's only so much---or little---that we can do:

Each year, a handful of corporations contribute to a large percentage of CO2 emissions 1, toxic waste release 2, and single use plastic production (from non-recycled material) 3.

Nevertheless, individual lifestyle and consumption behavior has an undeniable impact on sustainability by contributing to 72% of global greenhouse gas emissions 4. Together, individuals drive businesses and society to change:

In 2015, some 50 percent of responding companies had implemented intensity emissions reduction targets. About 90 percent of all responding companies had active emissions reduction initiatives in place 5.

While we initially wanted to create a habit tracker for sustainable living (that gamifies simple tasks, such as biking to work), we felt it was not enough. Then we came up with an idea that might bring out the synergy of both individuals' and businesses' effort towards sustainability---enter plantey.

About plantey

plantey provides a platform for both individuals and business partners to contribute to a common goal---sustainable living.

For business users, it is a community that deeply care about sustainable initiatives. Society expects businesses to take the lead in sustainable living, and consumers are increasingly aware of "green-washing" practices in the industry. plantey is a platform for businesses to show true devotion to sustainable causes, prove their good work, and find supporters for their initiatives.

Businesses can propose community challenges, where users try to complete a number of tasks (e.g., biking to work for a month instead of driving every day). In return, an altruistic "reward" is pledged by the sponsor for the sum of plantey points devoted to the cause by the entire community, which can be increased depending on the level of engagement, e.g., number of participants.
Businesses can share their current sustainable initiatives to gather feedback and boost their profiles.
Businesses can become long-term partners of plantey by pledging support in the form of financial / material resources for a sustainable cause (e.g., plant trees) to match and amplify community members' engagement in individual sustainable action.

For individual users, it is first of all a habit tracker that keeps track of your daily effort to live more sustainably, whether you are already an experienced zero-waste guru or want to embark on a sustainable journey today.

For each completed daily task ("quest"), users receive a fixed sum of plantey points.
plantey points can be spent on a sustainability initiative---sponsored by our business partners---to show care and support for the cause.
We (will) provide comprehensive statistics and record on habit building, task completion, challenge participation, and most importantly the "rewards" earned by every user, providing a sense of accomplishment that is directly linked to real-world impact.

An example: an individual user finishes the "Zero waste for a week" challenge by completing subtasks daily. They earned 1000 points for the challenge and 500 points for the daily tasks. In return, the challenge sponsor donates a sum of cash (or through action, e.g., planting trees) to a sustainability cause for every 100 participants who complete the challenge. The user can additionally spend the points earned, together with the points from daily challenges, on a sustainability cause of their choice.

How we built it

For the app outline and UI/UX design, a sketch was drawn by hand in Noteability. We used react-native and node.js to build the prototype. Icons from FontAwesome and stock images from Unsplash were a great boost to our UI.

Challenges we ran into

As neither of us had mobile development experience, every step---from setting up the environment to adding a component and running the app on device---was a challenge, but fun nonetheless.