Ukrainian innovation: waste sorting application

In Ukraine, the sorting and utilization of garbage is an urgent problem - while 95% of solid waste goes directly to landfills. While various eco-initiatives are supported at the legislative level in the EU, in our country everything is mainly based on altruism and self-organization of enthusiasts.

A month ago, on two mobile platforms Google Play and the App Store, a free application “CleWo” was released, which was developed by a team of startupers from Kharkov. Its essence is to help people quickly find recycling points.

The idea to make such an application came to the head of IT specialist Yegor Kutz, when he saw nobody needed just a few meters from the recycling point. “I thought: why these two things can’t find each other?” - Yegor recalls the start of the project. Then he, together with like-minded people, decided to create an application in which anyone could photograph his garbage and put it out, and another person could also find and pick it up. Gradually, a simple idea grew into a whole environmental application designed for conscious citizens who care about the country's ecology.

Egor Kutz: “A user, having seen somewhere a point of receiving bottles, plastic or something else, open a map and put a mark so that other people and organizations who are not indifferent to the state of the environment do not waste time searching for where to put rubbish. It turned out the same way as with garbage - when people are interested in something, but do not know where to look for it. We give them the opportunity to find each other and at the same time make the world a little cleaner. ” The idea of reuse was gradually added to the main functions - this is when one person no longer needs things that can serve further, but they can be useful to someone else.

So far, the operation of the application is kept exclusively at the expense of the development guys. To make their dreams come true, they raised a first installment on the crowdfunding platform, and plan to invest their funds in the further development and commercialization of the resource. But, Yegor proudly says, after a month of operation, the application was downloaded by more than a thousand users, and this gives hope that the eco-program will find many supporters among ordinary citizens and business representatives.