Mobile Apps for Circular economy
To establish a sustainable system, we must comprehend sustainable development and how it impacts our daily lives. A circular economy(CE) reduces waste and resource usage by maximizing the use of recyclable and renewable resources while reducing the amount of waste released into the environment. It is also called an "eco-friendly" or "sustainable" development model.
How does the World Economic Forum define the circular economy?
"A circular economy is an industrial system that is restorative or regenerative by intention and design. It replaces the end-of-life concept with restoration, shifts towards the use of renewable energy, eliminates the use of toxic chemicals, which impair reuse and return to the biosphere, and aims for the elimination of waste through the superior design of materials, products, systems, and business models."
A sustainable development approach is based on data collection and research. Sustainability is measured by the success of a sustainable development model in achieving its goals. For that reason, apps help collect data on various aspects of sustainability. Researchers use different mobile apps to assess the success of a sustainable development model. It provides a convenient way to collect data on multiple aspects of sustainability that otherwise would be difficult or impossible to obtain.
And now, the trend toward a circular economy is gaining ground, particularly as many businesses pledge to prioritize sustainability.
Do you know?
According to the Harvard Business Review, almost all significant corporations publish sustainability reports and set goals. More than 2,000 corporations have established science-based carbon targets, and roughly one-third of Europe's largest publicly traded corporations have committed to going net zero by 2050.
How can mobile apps be used to enable a circular economy?
- Several governments use apps for traffic monitoring. Collecting data through an app makes it easy to measure transportation efficiency and identify transportation bottlenecks, which helps with road planning and maintenance. It also helps with traffic management; drivers become more aware and careful when driving when monitored through an app.
- Similarly, farmers have used apps for crop monitoring for several years now. They use them to track vegetable growth, decide when to harvest their produce, follow climate and weather conditions, find seed hubs and fertilizers, and avoid overproduction that depletes their resources and leaves them with nothing to sell.
- Another everyday use case for an app is in environmental education. Schools use them for ecological studies or field trips; they can expose students to environmental concerns and investigations. They can do this by collecting data on student performance or feedback from students during field trips. This allows students to experience the natural world first-hand while learning in the classroom simultaneously.
- Interactive mobile applications are made with participation from users and bottom-up methodologies in mind. Citizens can communicate with waste management authorities in real time by using interactive programs to convey questions, problems, comments, or service requests. Additionally, citizens have access to databases, applications, and forms. Creating "maps" of waste collection, street cleaning and litter removal in the city, recycling programs, citizen complaints and problem reporting (e.g., illegal dumping, insufficient waste collection/cleaning services); services upon request (e.g., scheduling the collection of bulk waste); and real-time citizen feedback and information inquiry services are a few of the applications that fall under this category (e.g., payment transactions between citizens and waste management authorities) are some of the prominent areas where mobile apps can aid for CE.
The idea of the circular economy is to minimize waste by reusing items and materials instead of dumping them. Using an app can help facilitate these practices by enabling people to collect data on where things come from and how they were produced before consumers buy them. This will allow businesses to understand where their products are coming from and ensure their supply chains are ethical before buying from them. It promotes greater transparency in supply chains by ensuring businesses don't hide where their products come from—thereby promoting more fantastic ethical consumption practices among consumers.
Apps also have many uses outside of sustainability studies; they help collect environmental data on a person's phone or tablet device. Collecting data through an app makes it easy to measure your environment directly from your smartphone or tablet. This makes it easy to assess your environmental impact as you interact with the natural world directly. Specific apps collect data on your daily habits, home, office, and outdoor and indoor environments to measure your impact against typical societal norms and environmental effects. Through mobile apps, you can get real-time information about noise, heat stress, or light pollution from daily activities such as cooking, eating, eating at work, or sleeping under light sources like streetlamps or neon signs—all while you're mobile!
Taking it forward, now let's look at some of the best implementations of the circular economy.
1. Kamilo
Kamilo, a start-up based in California, offers a chain of custody solution based on Esri GIS and blockchain to track global supply chains in real-time, ensure sustainability, and promote a circular economy.
It establishes a verifiable connection between plastic recoveries and reuses and directly links GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions and other ESG data to the flow of materials. Kamilo is a public benefit corporation with a new accountability system that monitors the route of plastic from waste to the next life.
Read more here: ESG: Environmental, Social, and Governance.
The phrase "environmental, social, and governance" (ESG) refers to an organization's corporate financial interests, emphasizing ethical and sustainable effects.
To track and account for plastic trash as it flows through the supply chain from collecting to processing to making new products, Kamilo has developed an innovative technology platform and mobile app.
To follow the transit of tons of plastic, they included using distinct digital identifiers, which allowed them to create a digital twin of related physical events and the capacity to demonstrate and confirm circular traceability inside supply chains. An immutable, cryptographically verifiable chain of custody is stored in the data, which is uploaded promptly to a secure low-energy version of a blockchain-based ledger.
2. Agricolus
This is an Italian tool that specializes in precision agriculture, providing farmers and agronomists with a variety of cloud applications that allow them to follow the production process in 360 degrees and make data-driven decisions that will lower costs, improve, and ensure excellent performance of the agricultural product with an eye toward sustainability.
3. Junker
Junker is a smartphone app that enables users to rapidly and accurately sort domestic rubbish, lowering the percentage of unsorted waste. It is mentioned in the sustainable industrial white paper from the European Parliament.
4.FruitsApp
is an international B2B marketplace for buying and selling fruits and vegetables. Chats, bartering systems, and profiling are just a few of the tools the site provides to assist the parties in reaching agreements. The Startupbootcamp Foodtech Accelerator has helped it advance.
5. Timealy
This app enables homeowners and commuters to purchase daily leftover fresh food at a pitiful price. In London, the platform is now being introduced.
The utilization of renewable energies is crucial, as are the modularity and adaptability of the products, which must be employed in various settings to endure as long as feasible. The circular economy assumes a systematic method of thinking beyond creating items with a single use. In this economy, revenues are generated in addition to environmental protection, production, and management cost-saving measures.
Unlike the linear economy, which starts with the manufacture of a product and ends with it becoming waste, the circular economy involves the development of an open economy. Many environmentalists appreciate the development of mobile apps that support this concept, and the positive action of corporations to invest in CE is what is overwhelming.
Sustainability is complex; it's based on sound planning, transparent conduct of business operations, and ethical consumer habits, among other things. Therefore, apps make it much easier to implement a sustainable development model that supports data collection and research in this field, which is essential in understanding our environment and developing new eco-friendly technologies to help sustain life on Earth!
