ZEEWA BLUEPRINT
Zeewa.io Blueprint
The average person in the West takes their trash out 50 times a year. Members of our Zeewa community do this only 10 times a year. This is the equivalent if England would stop producing trash overnight in the UK completely. Zeewa is a zero emission waste management community that works.
Zeewa was born out of the need to eliminate illegal dumpsites across Hungary. We built a community of enthusiasts and activists who registered over 4000 dumpsites in the country, called Waste Hunters. Then we got to work and started working with both government and private organisations to help secure support and funding for getting rid of these dumpsites for the benefit of both the local environment and communities.
Our mission is to enable and support local communities dedicated to cleaning up their environments. According to United Nations we dump over 2.12 billion metric tons of waste on our planet every year. Meaning that if we were to keep this trend, we’d soon need another Earth just to store our trash. 99% of this comes from our consumption focused society, where within 6 months of purchase we throw our things away.
he Zeewa Community consists of activists who seek out and clean up these sites. So far most of our members have been doing so out of pure enthusiasm and by introducing “spot funding” through secure smart contracts we can enable crowdfunding to enable targeted support for local issues.
Zeewa Platform 1.0
The Zeewa Platform is the engine that powers our community. The platform glues together the three major pillars of operation: community, partnerships and rewards. Our vision is to keep evolving Zeewa to cover more and more of our community’s activities.
Today we have our existing online communities with tens of thousands of people who actively seek out and submit illegal waste deposits. Through our marketing activities we are ready to scale this community and expand from Hungary to all across Europe.
The process is simple and based on a self-reporting system. Once an illegal site has been spotted, anybody can submit them on Zeewa. Once submitted, our team has to approve the submission for quality control purposes. Once it passes our tests, it goes live on the Zeewa Platform, automatically creating a Waste Collection Event. From this point, donations can be made via spot funding through the use of smart contracts.
Funding can arrive to these Waste Collection Events (WCE) from multiple sources:
(1) Local governments, associations and potentially interested corporations or NGOs can sign
up upon being approach by the Zeewa team. (2) Activists and enthusiasts can donate freely to specific issues. On our website Zeewa.io
We calculate the funding requirements for removing each dumpsite which is discussed in the Unit Economics part of this document. Once sufficient funding is secured, we hire activists, organise the event and dispose of the collected waste in a safe manner.
Zeewa Platform 2.0
The next step in our evolution is to create income opportunities for those activists that are actively engaging in cleaning up our environment. In order to manage this we will create Reward Pools into which we will deposit any excess income and funding beyond covering the costs of operation and waste removal.
This semi-automated process ensures that all our focus is turned on removing waste from the ecosystem through smart incentives. Zeewa 2.0 will mark the foundation upon which we will expand to other regions in Europe such as Germany and the United Kingdom as well as exploring opportunities to get started in India.
Zeewa Platform 3.0
The final step in the development of Zeewa from a community of eco-conscious activists into an efficient waste-removal operation is technology. We have been working with Pinter Muvek for the last year to develop a piece of proprietary technology that allows us to turn packaging plastics into raw materials like fuel that we can sell on the open market.
This will increase our capacity to pay activists in our Reward Pool as well as funding further expansion. The technology is currently at the late stages of development and we believe that by introducing this process, we will be able not only to expand faster but to reach out to corporates and whitelabel our process, helping them reduce their ecological footprint whilst having a positive impact on their P&L at the same time.
Unit Economics
The unit economics of Zeewa is largely governed by the economics of waste disposal. There is a generic 4000 HUF / cubic metre manual labour cost. Based on our experience that equals to 4800 HUF / metric ton in terms of ratios. Based on average distribution of materials in illegal dumpsites per metric tons, the unit economics are the following.
These are net figure, excluding VAT.
Packaging Plastic (PP) Inert
Type | % | Disposal cost permetric ton (HUF) | Manual labour (HUF) | Revenue Potential |
Packaging Plastic (PP) | 5% | N/A | 240 | High |
Other Plastic | 10%
| N/A | 480 | Exchange to PP |
Other Recycle | 5% | N/A | 240 | Exchange to PP |
Communal Waste | 20% | 25000 | 960 | N/A |
Inert | 60% | 6250 | 2880 | N/A |
TOTAL | 100% | 31250 | 4800 |
Based on this logic the average disposal cost of illegal dumpsites per metric ton is 36050 HUF + VAT.
Further costs can include rewards, marketing, fundraising and operational costs and logistics. As an educated guess our assumption is that removing a metric ton of waste should cost less than 50 000 HUF + VAT on average.
The average illegal dumpsite measures 5 metric tons in Hungary. By calculating with 4000 sites altogether, our current mission means disposing of 20 000 metric tons of illegal waste with an estimated total cost of 1 000 000 000 HUF + VAT. (~ €3m + VAT)
By introducing Zeewa Platform 2.0 later in 2019 and establishing strategic partnerships with local governments and governmental organisations we seek to create a sustainable business model that allows the Zeewa Community to put Hungary on a track towards zero waste.
Zeewa Coin
In order to enable “spot funding” and create a trustless and permissionless environment for the Zeewa Platform we have designed the Zeewa Coin - an internal currency for donations and paying our activists.
We generated 800 million ZWA tokens to allow consumers to donate towards specific local causes. Every user registered to the Zeewa Platform gets access to their Wallets that can hold Zeewa tokens.
Initially as the platform enters the market, users can purchase tokens and donate to specific causes directly from within the platform. In the meantime we’re seeking partnerships with local exchanges (i.e. Coincash in Hungary). As Zeewa expands to new regions we will unlock more and more of the initial token supply and seek partnerships with more exchanges to provide liquidity.
Initially all participants will be paid in Zeewa tokens which they can sell on the platform for cash or donate to further causes. Zeewa as a currency will start as a stablecoin, backed by fiat money based on the initial donations.
As we unlock more Zeewa Coins from within our supply, we will gradually move towards a free floating mechanism where the value of ZWA will be determined by the market. This type of “staircasing” allows us to minimise friction until Zeewa gains mainstream adoption.
The release of further tokens onto the market will be calculated based on the currency’s market velocity rate. Once we reach an inflection point where