Carbon Addons Workshop

Overview

Carbon addons is a Surabaya start-up founded by Mr Mohammad Naufal, a young Indonesian who felt strongly about the environment and waste management. The company developed a plugin software application that is integrated into target market systems such as e-commerce, retailers, shipping services and transportation services, to allow consumers to offset their carbon footprint by paying an additional amount proportional to the emissions generated by their consumption. The funds collected are then channelled into activities that will compensate for the carbon footprint, such as renewable energy project developers and tree plantations that have long-term and sustainable effects.

After going on Learning Journeys organised by Carbon Addons in the morning, we engaged in two workshops facilitated by Carbon Addons. The first workshop showcased Sebumi, a company they partnered with, and we learnt about their efforts to upcycle plastic bottle caps into fashion accessories such as beaded bracelets. The plastic caps are sorted and moulded in heat before getting cut into beads. The beads had a beautiful marble design that we made into bracelets. As part of the workshop, we also calculated our rough carbon footprint for a day using a website provided by Carbon Addon. In the second workshop, we used tools provided in the Carbon Journal from Carbon Addon to challenge ourselves to come up with solutions to any social or environmental issue of our choice using Design Thinking.

We ended the day hearing about Mr Naufal’s entrepreneurship journey. He started as a youth activist involved in social and environmental causes. Upon graduating from his studies, Mr Naufal got a job as an environmental consultant in Singapore. However, when the Covid-19 pandemic struck, he decided to return to Indonesia, where he observed that many people were engaged in online shopping and generating a lot of packaging waste. Feeling upset by the situation, Mr Naufal decided to do something about it with some like-minded friends and founded Carbon Addons.

What we learnt about Innovation / Social Innovation

Knowing your target audience is vital

In Mr Naufal’s solution to get people to pay slightly more to offset carbon emissions, he paid close attention to his target audience. Most of the people who would be shopping online were from the younger generation, who were more likely to be aware of environmental issues and feel the need to change for a better environment. This increases the likelihood of those on the online shopping sites to pay to offset their carbon emissions, making his product viable. We learnt that when innovating, it is important to keep in mind the habits of our target audience and what they tend to do, and tailor our solutions towards them to ensure our solution works better.

Turning challenges into opportunities

During the Covid-19 pandemic, online shopping surged and the environmental cost related to it became more apparent globally. Carbon Addon’s solution thus dealt with a current problem in a timely manner and was able to reach a wider audience. From this, we learn that in our social innovation process, we need to be able to learn from challenges faced and adapt our solutions to better solve such issues so that we can produce effective results.

Look to models and tools to aid our ideation process

As we ideated solutions to our chosen problems during the workshop, we were given a model to evaluate how sustainable, viable, feasible and desirable our selected solution was. This made us realise that there is more to social innovation than just using the design thinking process. There are many models and tools online that help us to empathise, ideate, prototype etc. It is important that instead of just blindly trying to go through the design thinking process, we learn the methods behind each step and how to achieve it.

Other thoughts

We were intrigued and fascinated by the upcycling of plastic bottle caps being a practice in Surabaya as the products made by it were able to be repurposed into many materials and it was creative to see how plastic waste could be given a new use. Mr Naufal's experience allowed us to reflect on the importance of passion and goals in serving communities and ideating products. Mr Naufal faced a lot of challenges as a start-up entrepreneur, however, he still followed his passion and persevered for the good of the environment. Through this experience, we were also taught on how to be more conscious of our carbon emissions and how to offset it to ensure that we play our part in reducing our carbon footprint.

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