Recycle Myanmar

“To make the cities cleaner and sustainable”

Design Roles

UX Director

Phil Gribbon

UX Designer

NgeOo Mon

UI Designer

Chan Zaw

Tools Used

Project Goal

To design a practical plastic waste management system that makes recycling easier and more efficient for households, collectors, and recycling centers in Myanmar.

Problem Statement

Recycling in Myanmar faces both human and institutional challenges. Households often neglect waste segregation due to lack of awareness of the 3Rs (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle), increasing costs and inefficiencies in the recycling chain. Waste collectors and recycling centers struggle with manual workflows and limited connectivity, while government support and infrastructure remain insufficient to streamline processes.

Here are the main challenges:

Household challenges (behavior, awareness, costs).
Collector challenges (manual, inefficient collection).
Institutional challenges (government support, infrastructure).

Recycling requires behavioral change within self and as a community. Social practices such as separating waste and considering the environment have been neglected in Myanmar which directly affect the recycling chain

HUMAN PROBLEM

Lacking in government’s adequate support and control for managing waste and recycling for the country. The municipal department can not provide efficient service to assist people in disposing their waste and doesn’t illustrate the harmful results of irresponsible waste management. Furthermore, lack of technology and infrastructure creates layers of processing in the recycling chain from collecting materials into producing recycled products.

INSTITUTIONAL PROBLEM

User Research

I led the UX design research and we head out to the neighborhoods on the first day to observe the existing system. And to study the touch-points of the current working flow. We talked to the recycling material collectors, shops, and some households to schedule a time to come back and interview them for one on one interviews.

From a report commissioned by Coca-Cola (Data shown below), it shows the amount of recycling materials collected in the main city of Myanmar, Yangon. This is the result from only the 13% households segregating the waste.

The huge opportunity is to scale up and make everything more efficient.

P.E.T bottles (Yangon)

1 %

Aluminum Cans

1 %

Segregating Waste

1 %

Players in Myanmar's Waste Circular System

Waste Contributors
Recycle Collectors
Local Recycling Center
Material Trade Center
Recycling Processing Factory
Factory Owner
City Ordinance Staff
Waste Collectors
Environmental NGO

Important Insight: The Players Need to Co-exist

After synthesizing, we pin pointed 6 important user groups (shown below) in the recycling ecosystem, and to make the system efficient, we then had to separate the different user needs from this map.

Due to the infrastructure and lack of city ordinances’ support in education and maintaining the 3Rs, the users rely on each other in this ecosystem. Thus, Recycle Myanmar can fill in the gap of connectivity and business opportunity with each other, resulting in a cleaner and sustainable city in the long run.

HMW remind the households the importance of 3 Rs?

How Might We-Contributors

HMW help the waste collectors better reach the households to collect more plastics?

How Might We-Collectors

HMW maximize time for the recycling centers to be able to buy back plastics quickly so that they can sell back the amount that the trade centers need?

How Might We-Recycling Centers

HMW segregate the type of recyclable materials so that the recycling plants can easily find items they need fast and easy?

How Might We-Recycling Plants

#1. Conceptualization (Grab Trash)

B2C: For contributor & Collector

After two weeks of user research and synthesizing, we proposed that firstly, Recycle Myanmar should run educational campaigns about recycling through social media.

Then, we believe collecting trash and the households asking people to take their trash should be as easy as a person who needs a ride and a driver who needs people they can pick up so we proposed to use Grab methodology to design a trash collecting and trash disposing mobile application (Android).

#2. Conceptualization (Business Directory)

B2B: For material centers and recycling plants

Solution proposal #2 consists of an app that encompasses the essence of a Yellow Pages directory for businesses in the United States.

The target users for this application is for the Recycling/Trade Centers and Recycling Plants of the ecosystem.

This app will allow both users to specify the type of recyclable materials they’re selling or buying and have the capability to filter out different shops/providers based on location and availability. Thus, the recycling plants will be able to find their materials at the time of need and the small centers will have an opportunity to meet larger buyers.

Conclusion

The initial idea the organization had in mind was to create a marketplace of recyclable materials for users to trade. After I studied the ecosystem and conducting user research, I found that we would need to first fill in the need of resource allocation and efficiency in the flow of materials from point A to point B since the problem we’re trying to solve was “to make the cities cleaner and more sustainable”. Thus, I proposed to the client that having Recycle Myanmar App (for households) and Recycle Myanmar Business App (for recyclable shops) will expedite the time and effort spent in this recycling circular system while still educating people about the importance of recycling.