Sustainability products face a hard truth: people support recycling in principle far more than they participate in practice. The gap is almost always friction. With Waste Marche, our brief was to close that gap — to make trading recyclable materials so simple that doing the sustainable thing was also the easy thing.
Meet people where the friction is
We started by mapping the real journey of someone with recyclable material to sell, and the buyer on the other side. The barriers weren’t ideological — they were practical: not knowing what something was worth, not trusting the counterparty, and too many steps to list or buy.
People don’t abandon sustainable choices because they stop caring. They abandon them because the app made it harder than it needed to be.
Make value obvious
The single biggest unlock was showing value upfront. When a supplier can see, immediately, what their material is worth and who wants it, the decision to list becomes easy. We designed the listing flow around instant clarity rather than long forms.
- Guided listing that turns a complex catalogue of materials into a few simple choices.
- Transparent pricing signals so suppliers aren’t negotiating blind.
- Trust cues — ratings, verified buyers, clear histories — so both sides feel safe transacting.
Every extra step in a sustainability flow is a chance for someone to give up and throw the material away instead. We treated step-count as an environmental metric, not just a UX one.
Two-sided products need two-sided empathy
A marketplace only works if both sides show up. Suppliers want speed and fair value; buyers want reliable supply and quality they can trust. We designed each side’s experience for its own motivations rather than forcing one interface to serve both awkwardly.
The takeaway
Designing for sustainability isn’t about lecturing users into better behaviour — it’s about removing the friction that stops them acting on values they already hold. With Waste Marche, good UX wasn’t a layer on top of the mission. It was the mission.