Recicla2 — Recycling That Pays You Back
Recicla2 is a mobile app for El Salvador that turns recycling into points, and points into prizes. You take your material to a nearby collection centre, identify yourself with your document number or a QR code, and the pounds you drop off become a balance you can spend on a bike, headphones, a food voucher or a raffle ticket.
Nobody recycles because an app asks them to. They recycle when the reward is concrete and the next step is obvious. So the whole design question was how to make an environmental habit feel like a game you are already winning.
Four Screens to Explain a Whole Habit
The onboarding does not describe features, it teaches the loop: collect the plastic at home, find the nearest centre on the map, show your QR at the counter, watch the points turn into prizes. One idea per screen, one illustration each, a progress bar that shows the end is close. The mascot — a smiling globe — carries the tone so the app never sounds like a public-sector campaign, and the green is used to mean progress: the button you press, the points you earn, the pin on the map.
Points, Prizes and a Neighbourhood Leaderboard
The product surface covers the whole loop: the home with your balance and the prizes within reach, the map of collection centres, the rewards catalogue with the exact point cost of each item, the wallet showing what a point is worth in dollars, the community ranking of the best recyclers in your municipality with friends you can invite, and your recycling history with the date, the pounds and the plant that received them.
Delivered as an interactive Figma prototype over a consistent component library, so the reward economy could be tested with real users before a single screen was built.
