Build & operate circular supply chains

Empower Tracking is a disruptive solution for solving plastic waste pollution in developing countries and bringing transparency to the recycling industry.

Transaction data is secured by blockchain technology to achieve traceability and immutability. This increases the value of recycled plastic and benefits every level of the recycling supply chain, especially suppliers and waste pickers.

Such a digital tracking infrastructure helps shape a truly circular economy. It brings the recycling process to a transparent and traceable level, helping combat greenwashing while protecting the environment and reducing poverty.

Field: B2B & B2C
SaaS product
Blockchain
Circular economy
Capabilities: UX research
UX Design
Prototyping
Design System
UI Design
Design awards: iF DESIGN AWARD 2023
UX Design Awards 2023 nomination
Red Dot Design Concept Awards finalist
A' Design UX Design Runner Up

Challenge

I joined Empower in the company's early stage in 2019, when all digital products needed to be developed from scratch. I worked with the product manager and stakeholders to interpret ideas, build MVPs, test quickly, and continuously iterate.

Approach

The design process followed a user-centered methodology across understanding, discovery and definition, design, and prototype testing. Product iterations balanced business requirements with user feedback.

Result

Over two years of design, implementation, and iteration.
Over 40 organizations registered and over 2000 active users.
Ongoing collaboration with two of the world's largest petrochemical companies: DOW and BASF.
Total kilograms incentivized and tracked: 7,663,179.

Opportunity and challenges

The EU incentivizes businesses at different levels to be part of the circular economy, which means using recycled materials instead of raw materials to minimize material consumption in production and protect the environment.

Trust is a key challenge: raw materials may be labelled as recycled materials due to high market demand. At the same time, sourcing suppliers and predicting production time and budget can be difficult without a transparent system.

Solution: data encrypted in the tracking process

Empower Tracking System is the core product of the Empower digital infrastructure. With blockchain technology, the system supports waste management infrastructure and traceable supply chains where lack of transparency is a problem.

This global digital tracking infrastructure helps shape a circular economy. Retail companies can prove their use of responsible recycled plastic and show the story behind the products to their customers.

Empower Marketplace

Empower Marketplace is for recycled plastic that is fully certified and documented with verified provenance, social impact data, and environmental impact data. It makes it easy to track the origin of recycled plastic and bring transparency to the market.

Product Passport

Empower Product Passport shows customers the environmentally positive journey of products made from recycled materials. It engages customers with a narrative journey from the exact cleanup operation behind the plastic content to the final product in their hands.

Challenges and approaches in the design process

Considering the confidential nature of the project, I do not show the full design process. Instead, this section outlines the challenges I met and the approaches used to tackle them.

In B2B products, personas may include decision-makers, key users, and support teams. Understanding these different roles helped the team make better prioritization decisions.

I was also involved in the company's internal systems, which meant many features had to be considered across platforms to avoid missing dependencies in the overall process.

User interface

The design system evolved from Figma to Storybook. To improve efficiency across the product team and reduce back and forth between designers and front-end developers, the component library was built with Chromatic and viewed in Storybook.

Due to limited capacity, responsive design was applied incrementally after the first product versions were released. The UI continued to evolve as new features, content, structure, and usability improvements were added.