• Cristian Lara and Alonso Martínez, both students at the Industrial Civil Engineering program of Universidad de Santiago de Chile, created Reciclapp, an application for mobile phones that allows everyone to recycle from his/her own house.

A year ago, Cristian Lara (23) and Alonso Martínez (23), both students at the Industrial Civil Engineering program of Universidad de Santiago, gave a presentation at an international meeting of innovation and technology entrepreneurs (known as hackathons) about the project that they had been working on: an application for mobile devices to promote recycling and contribute to environmental care.

And this how the story of Reciclapp started: and innovative initiative that outpaced its competitors and allowed the two friends to access the Santiago Innova business incubator.

According to the Chilean Ministry of the Environment, the country generates almost 17 million metric tons of waste solids a year, and 6.5 million of them come from households, but only 10% is recycled. Cristian Lara highlights that by using Reciclapp, anyone can inform from his/her own house about the material they will give to the recycling-material collectors.

“For example, you can inform about plastic or glass bottles, cans, cardboard boxes and paper that you plan to discard and the date and time when this material can be collected. We prepare a map and a schedule with all the information, we send it to the collectors and they organize their roadmaps,” he says.

Work placement abroad

After winning the hackathon, Lara and Martínez faced new challenges to raise funds and continued quickly positioning Reciclapp.

In November 2015, they presented their project in fiiS, the largest social innovation international festival in the country, and a month later, they became the first Universidad de Santiago students in winning the largest entrepreneurship contest for university students in Chile and Latin America: Jump Chile.

The prize they were awarded included a work placement abroad, in Bolivia. Once in that country, they implemented pilot schemes in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, El Alto y La Paz. “We were warmly welcomed; we met with some Bolivian Ministers and we managed to establish the company there,” he says. 

Later, new members joined the work team: Ian Bofill and Christian Torreblanca, both students at the Industrial Civil Engineering program; Bárbara Urrutia, a student at the Business Engineering program; Manuel Fonseca, a student at the Industrial Engineering program of Universidad de Chile, and Efraín Rebolledo, a computer engineer from Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María and current programmer at Microsoft.

Back in Santiago, they entered the Start-Up Chile acceleration program, which allowed them to raise 25 million pesos and gave them the possibility of participating in the program.

Early in August, they won another victory during the GeekCamp, an activity that gathers together investors and mentors from all over the world, particularly from Silicon Valley.

This allowed them to raise at least 60 million pesos and they also received two special awards for the best pitch and the best business model. Now, they are planning to travel in Latin America and the United States by the end of this year.

Besides, the project will be one of the first Chilean entrepreneurships included in the Facebook Messenger application. For now, it is only available for Android OS.

“Our recycler’s data base is larger than the one of the Ministry of the Environment; they are more than 250, in 35 different cities in Chile and we are very close to them. In Bolivia, we are working with more than 400 recyclers. We are planning to add more cities in Chile and Bolivia next year and we also expect to be operating in Colombia, Mexico and the United States, in California.

University support

Cristian Lara says that, without the support of Universidad de Santiago, the project would not have been successful. He highlights the support given by the Industrial Engineering Department (DIIND, in Spanish), particularly by director Miguel Alfaro Marchant and professors Juan Sepúlveda Salas and Marcela Rosinelli Contreras.

Translated by Marcela Contreras