Natra

Natra provides a digital platform for businesses and individuals to collaborate in order to repurpose and reduce waste.

Natra is a mobile application that helps businesses and individuals collaborate to preserve the environment. When a user signs up, they pick if they are a business or individual, and depending on what they select they are given tips/lessons on how they can reduce their personal carbon footprint and waste. Though the dashboard, they can track how much change they are making, motivating them to keep going with their conservation efforts. Furthermore, there is a scanner where they can scan products they use and find out whether they are bad for the environment. Aside from these features, there is also a more collaborative part of the app.

Businesses, even small ones, often produce huge amounts of waste that can actually be repurposed and reused. Through Natra, business owners can set aside waste such as plastic, paper, and food waste. Then, the businesses and ordinary people work together to either compost the waste so it does not end up in a landfill, or actually repurpose it so it can be used again. Natra provides creative ideas for what to do with the waste(for instance a chandelier made out of plastic bottles), stopping the cycle of waste.

One of the biggest reasons for the huge amounts of waste we produce is a lack of awareness on the effects of this waste/how we can repurpose and reduce this waste. In my community, everyone is affected by this problem and I see huge amounts of food and plastic waste in many places where it could be prevented(ex. in my school where huge amounts of food are thrown away for no reason and recycling is often contaminated). The biggest factor contributing to this problem is that learning about how to reduce/repurpose waste is a very time and effort intensive task. People who want to help the environment often don't know where to start, and since they have to put so much effort into it they often give up on being more eco-friendly. A statistic that shows this is the fact that in Illinois, where I live, we make 19 million tons of garbage a year, which is 23% than other states, and only 37% of this waste material is ever recycled. A huge amount of this waste could have been recycled or reused if people had more knowledge about the waste they are producing, and thus, the best way to solve the problem of nature degradation is to spread more knowledge about it and make it a community effort. This is the end goal of Natra.

The target population whose lives this will improve is my generation(Gen Z), as learning how to live more sustainably now will allow us to implement these habits for the rest of our lives. It will also help us preserve the world around us which is quickly degrading due to human activities. Currently, our generation is very socially conscious but not environmentally conscious, and spreading education about the environment is the key to fixing this. Furthermore, making nature preservation a fun task by collaborating with businesses and repurposing old waste will drastically improve general interest in being more environmentally conscious. Thus, this solution directly addresses the needs of a population that is uninformed about the environment by making education about waste/climate not only easy but also fun.

Having done research with many potential users in both my age demographic and older generations, I have found that many people are interested in learning about the world around us if it does not consume huge amounts of their time. 100% of the people I interviewed were concerned about the state of our environment and agreed that something must be done, but a whopping  76% did not know anything they could do as individuals to help the situation. With a bit of guidance and help from their communities, all these people could make a huge change in their environment, and 85% of them were interested in using Natra for this purpose. I tested the app with all these users and incorporated their suggestions about what kind of activities would make them more interested in nature preservation.

We are in the prototype phase moving to the pilot phase because I am still talking to local businesses who are interested in repurposing their waste through Natra. The app is built, but I am still adding features to it based on feedback from interviewees and these businesses. Soon, it will be released to the App Store and in my community I will start a group that composts waste from local restaurants and creates products from seemingly useless plastic waste.

The application is built with the Flutter framework, using the Dart programming language and a MySQL Database as the backend.

The solution has not yet been launched, but next year, since the only barrier to participation is having a smartphone, we hope to affect around 5,000 users who will be able to make a huge impact in their community through their use of the app.

We hope to fundamentally change the habits of our users by showing them that living a more eco friendly lifestyle is easy and rewards not only them but also the entire community around them. Furthermore, we hope to create engaging communities where many people can come together to create cool projects by repurposing waste into beautiful art. Overall, Natra will help create a healthier world by helping users both understand how to help the world around them and join communities that will support them in this process.

Since our dashboard tracks the total environmental change users are making, we will track the emissions, water, waste, etc. that users are saving in order to measure our progress and impact on the world.

A barrier that limits our impact is marketing Natra, as there are many people who are interested in nature conservation who are not actively researching it due to the high effort it requires, and targeting these people in our marketing will be difficult.

I have been interested in nature conversation since 4 years ago when I read about microplastics and how they kill many sea creatures every single year. Since then, I have been finding ways to repurpose plastic, cardboard, etc. in order to create less waste. Through this journey, I have also found many tips and lessons that have helped me reduce my own carbon footprint and waste, and I have encouraged the people around me to do the same. This journey of becoming more eco-friendly through personal research and effort has shown me that a lack of education pertaining the environment is the biggest problem facing us today and it has helped me find fun and engaging ways to help anyone become more eco-friendly!

We are working with local businesses but not any organizations yet, but after we release to the App Store we hope to work with other organizations.