Cyclefi is the Greek national winner of the Smart Cities category of the StartUp Europe Awards. The startup offers an innovative waste-tracking technology which is accompanied by a rewarding mechanism that connects recycling performance with discounts for online deals. It aims to transform a previously disposable product (garbage bags for recycling) into discounts, resulting in the protection of the environment while at the same time increasing the purchase power of the users.

Over 50% of the world’s population now lives in cities, and the figure is set to rise up to 75% by 2050. Namely, in the majority of the Balkan cities waste management presents numerous inefficiencies and an extremely low recycling performance (of about 6%). In fact, more that 80% of the waste is landfilled, even though that half of that waste could be recycled.

Cyclefi tries to tackle this problem by introducing the first rewarding program for refusal bags. These bags are accompanied by a code that after being inserted offers unique discounts in supermarkets, electricity bills among many other. The estimate cost saving of the consumer per package of recycling refusal bags it is estimated to exceed 5$.