Honorable Mention

Solution

The reduction of electronic devices’ life cycle has created 50 mil tons of waste worldwide in 2018. This has lead to an increased waste of useful resources and a fast production of new products. Appliances could last longer, but it is quite challenging for single citizens to take action. That’s what leads us to StoryGood, a platform that helps citizens to consciously manage and maintain devices in a sustainable way, by keeping track of them in a digital archive and evaluating their life cycle.

Project Description

StoryGood is a platform that helps citizens to consciously manage and maintain electronic appliances in a sustainable way. Through their manual registration, users will have all the information regarding their devices in a single place, making easier to know how to do proper maintenance and to solve malfunctions. The sustainable evaluation allows a conscious understanding of appliances’ impact, letting users choose products according to both their needs and the environment. To measure their behaviour, users will receive points that will be collected to reach community goals. The community of users and a network of repair centers will be in support to make products last longer. People can share each other tips and tricks regarding devices’ maintenance and reviews. Through the app, people can directly contact local repair centers, making the repair process easier and immediate by establishing a direct contact line between clients and professionals.

Overview of the Solution

Electronic devices’ life cycle is increasingly shortening. People tend to replace them with new products more often leading to a marked increase in the e-waste per capita in Italy, of which. 19,000, are being collected each year just in Milan (CC RAEE report 2018). Moreover, electronic devices are designed to be cheaper to produce, making their disassembly and repair more difficult (iFixit, 2019) and the repair cost can be quite high, due to the strict policies of firms regarding third-party repairing centers (BBC, 2019).

Electronic devices could last longer and be less harmful for the environment, but is quite challenging for the single citizen to take action alone. StoryGood is a platform that enables users to manage and maintain electronic appliances in a sustainable way, offering: an archive, the evaluation of products’ sustainability and a local network. The archive allows users to have all the information regarding their devices at hand (warranties, manuals, the level of sustainability and tutorials about maintenance), in order to help them in their management. Products are evaluated in terms of sustainable production, durability, energy consumption, repair feasibility and warranty, helping citizens to consciously select new appliances. These data are retrieved from companies’ sustainability reports, assessments of repair associations and users’ feedbacks. A network of local repair centers, events about repair and refurbishment shops will be at the users’ disposal when they need professional and direct support for repairing or to give away a product they no longer use. Users will be awarded through points that will be collected to reach community goals for a more sustainable city and measure their own impact on the local environment.

The project is designed for citizens of big municipalities (over 200,000 inhabitants), starting from Milan and thereof involving local stakeholders, such as Repair Cafè, Restart Project and the Milanese municipality who will co-organize the events and provide data. With StoryGood, we encourage urban communities of citizens and companies to reduce the overall impact of electronic consumption and to extend the lifecycle of appliances, starting from the single person’s behaviors. The service aims to tackle the SDG 12 of responsible consumption and production of goods. Particular focus was taken to point 12.2.2, which recalls the need for sustainable management of domestic consumption and the use of resources.