Ghana Entrepreneurship News-Ghanaian are set to make money from plastic waste, ultimate winners of CARE Hackathon have hinted. Wonelcycer emerged as the ultimate Winners of Creatives in Augmented Reality Enterprises (CARE) hackathon which started on 24th August and ended on 21st September, 2018 at Kumasi Hive, Kentinkrono.
The group, Wonelcycer which is the reversed form of recycle now, is seeking to buy empty plastic bottles from Ghanaians to recycle. According to the group, this is a move to ensure a clean environment and to help people receive money from their waste products (plastic waste). In order to reach out to more people, an application software is being created for people to scan their empty bottles and send to Wonelcycer and are paid after the empty bottles are collected by the group.
The Co-founder of the group, Emmanuel Appiah in an interview with Edward Oppong Marfo says he and his co-founder, Sadat Ishaq saw the need to use technology to streamline the process of making the environment clean and making people sell their plastic wastes to make money at the same time.
“We realized that we can use technology to help with the process of gathering plastic waste to make the environment clean. We decided that lets make it competitive with picking of rubbish. So we thought of it that what if we can give them an information about the value of this trash because we know of the value of the trash. In our start up, we are saying trash is actually gold if only you know the value of it and that is where we come in. So by using the Augmented Reality app, by picking the trash, rubbish can, voltic bottle, awake bottle or whatever bottle, it gives an information that, this is worth this amount in the market now. We are hoping that we can put money back into the pockets of users because for every number of bottles or rubbish you gather, you are going to be paid for it,” he stated.
He added that they seek to buy the plastic waste from people and then sell to others who will use the rubbish to produce other products. He further added that Wonelcycer is looking forward to turning the plastic waste into plastic pallets.
“The future for us is that we are looking forward to turning this into plastic pallets and using them for producing bucket and stuff and selling them back, making more money and repeating the process”.
The training programme organized by Kumasi Hive in collaboration with British Council and Department of Communication Design at KNUST, aimed at training participants in Augmented Reality (AR) development. It sought to introduce and build capacity of students and businesses in multimedia and other aspects of creativity with practical skills in new frontier technologies in addressing societal and industrial challenges.
The hackathon which saw ten (10) groups pitching their ideas had the first three (3) groups receiving 250 Euros Each. Some participants have the opportunity of having internship placement with Creative Enterprises as well.
