Precious Shanghai

STUDENTS INVOLVED

Yuxin Lu

ABOUT

Precious Plastic Shanghai

Providing sustainable choices for a precious life

With China's rapid development, people's lives are becoming more and more convenient, but urban pollution and waste is increasing. I have worked with Precious Plastic Shanghai which is aiming to enable sustainability in Chinese people’s daily lives by creating a new solution that aims to help consumers to switch to sustainable habits while saving money, and support local business owners that offer sustainable options. The solution is a service system based on the WeChat platform, including Mimi’s personal WeChat account as a customer service contact, a subscription account as media, and an interactive map in the Wechat Mini App. Precious Shanghai acts as a bridge connecting local small businesses and local residents. The service can provide more sustainable options to local residents, and also could bring more traffic and customers to these small businesses.

Plastic is everywhere

We all know that plastic pollution is a worldwide issue. Plastic has spread everywhere in the ocean. People eat plastic equivalent to the weight of a credit card every week and ingest 100,000 plastic particles into the body every year. The sources of intake are drinking water, shellfish, beer, and salt. Shanghai produces 8 million tons of garbage every year. 27,000 tons of garbage are generated every day. Precious Plastic China is a company based in Shanghai that focuses on creating awareness about plastic waste, with a unique process. They do workshops with local residents but still find it hard to empower residents to implement a sustainable lifestyle. The two co-founders are foreigners, so it’s hard for them to really target local residents.

Precious Shanghai shows you how to consume plastic free

The Mini App is an interactive map collecting the shops that can provide sustainable services. Firstly, we have cooperated with some big brand cafes in Shanghai that have BYOM (Bring your own mug to receive a discount) service. We put a stand to promote our Mini App in these cafes. So it’s like a hook to catch more followers. Then we let them see more content from our subscription account, to build the trust of our story and interactions. Later we can try other shops. Mimi’s role is a contact of Precious SH and a helper to transfer our concept and service in a cute and fun way. If people add Mimi's Wechat they can have a chat. Mimi classifies different followers into different categories. Later, Mimi can use different channels to talk with them. Also, it will help us to build our database of local customers.

The next vision is on the way

By collecting more and more small business and local customers, we will bring more traffic and customers to these small businesses, and they will become our business allies. Meanwhile, we give local residents more awareness of environmental issues and they will expand the map, making our service sustainable. Right now, we have contacted some sustainability-related NGOs in China and they are all willing to cooperate with us to provide more information about sustainability. For instance, GoZeroWaste wants to give us more information about repair shops and bulk shops, because they are very familiar with these, and we will help them to promote their brand. In July, a sustainable brands Boomi and Shanghai coffee will cooperate with us to make a big campaign to encourage more cafes to provide such services and join our map. After that PPSH could gain a deeper understanding of how we can influence local residents to practice sustainable lifestyles. It has the potential to help some companies build their sustainable brand image and influence Chinese lifestyles. Currently a French energy company has got in touch with us. We know what they need and what we can bring to them. We realized Precious SH is an indirect marketing tool for Precious Plastic SH.

Feedback is amazing

I tested my solution with some business owners. Initially they were sceptical about changing behaviours. But when we told them that we can bring more customers in they were very happy to join our map and really hoped that we would be able to promote sustainable lifestyles. The co-founder of PPSH Adele gave me very strong feedback and we will still work together to implement our project in Shanghai and we will see how far we will go. We are really implementing our solution! Currently our subscription account has 410 followers. The first article introducing MIMI has 368 views and 44 people have added Mimi. I have published the mini App in June so from now on we have 256 users. For a Beta Vision, we believe that the data is of decent quality.

special thanks

Tutor: Neal Stone，Precious Plastic Shanghai: Adele, Andrea, Dangdang, Ricky, Xinchejian: James, Davide, Tech team: 北京跳跳糖创意科技有限公司, NGO: 大鱼社群营造，GoZeroWaste, 捡拾中国，Business: The bulk house, Boomi, Seesaw coffee, Super advisor: Chriz, Leno, Start-up leadership

Projects

Precious Shanghai

Precious Shanghai shows you how to consume plastic free

The next vision is on the way

students involved on the project