Core competence is digital
If China purchases 5 new clothes per person per year and 2 old clothes are discarded per person per year, the country will generate more than tens of millions of tons of waste clothing each year, which corresponds to 100 billion At the other end, there are 800,000 offline clothes recycling bins in the country, but most of them are in a difficult profit situation and no one cares about it.
The recent rise of the Internet door-to-door recycling model also faces the problem of high logistics costs. The “Ikaruga Recycling” interviewed recently hopes to use image recognition technology to transform the existing traditional offline recycling bin into a recycling terminal with Internet attributes.
QR code + ruler + smartphone
Compared to companies such as Xiao Huang Gou who specialize in smart recycling bins, the idea of Ikaruga recycling is to avoid investing in hardware IoT equipment as much as possible and to make the business lighter.
The specific solution is to paste a two-dimensional code, a ruler, and other simple transformations, and use a smartphone with a consumer as a receiving terminal. Using image recognition technology and algorithms, the traditional recycle bin can be online Weigh and recycle online. Scan the QR code to locate the recycling bin, take a ruler and take a picture with your smartphone to define the volume of the recycled laundry, and then automatically calculate the weight of the laundry in the background based on the image area, and realize online settlement.
Although there is still an error of about 1.5 kg per pack in online weight estimation, but because the value of old clothes is low, the accuracy requirements are not high. At the same time, for the release of clothing in different seasons, turtle doves have set up two settlement methods for winter clothing and summer clothing to reduce the weighing error as much as possible.
Compared to smart recycling bins with heavy asset investment, lightweight transformation has two advantages. The first is cost. The photoelectric recovery fee of a smart recycling bin equipped with infrared sensing and weighing equipment can reach hundreds or even thousands a year. It is difficult to cover the operating costs of the revenue from the recycling business. The second is security. The battery in the smart recycling bin may explode under the sun. The clothes in the recycling bin are highly flammable. Once the fire occurs, the safety hazard is great. “Online weighing” is completely free of this problem.
On the other hand,For the existing traditional recycle bins on the market, the significance of transformation and empowerment lies in firstly increasing the value of goods and the use of the power of the Internet to promote the enthusiasm of consumers to participate in the release of old clothes. It is further to improve management efficiency. By means of monitoring the remaining amount in the box, the problems of untimely cleaning of the recycling box and waste of reverse logistics costs are reduced.
In terms of the profit model, the founder Lu Yan believes that the more “academic” approach is to use online weighing services as a SaaS tool and charge management fees for recycling box operators. However, Turtle Dove wants to do another model. It accumulates a large amount of online consumer resources through online recycling services in the early stage, so as to divert to similar recycling companies such as premium products, reward recycling, and koala bears, through users and traffic. To make money. At the same time, it can also use its user resources to develop more services.
The key is error correction ability
The advantages of online recycling are convenience, efficiency, and low cost, but the challenges also exist. That is how to verify the problem of billing and fraud.
By ordering, through big data analysis, if it is found that the same consumer generates high-frequency placing behavior within a day, you can raise a warning and follow up with manual picture verification; for counterfeiting, due to image recognition, currently only recognition Volume, and can not identify whether the clothes or old newspapers wrapped in the bag, technically there is no cost-effective solution. Although a single return of about five yuan will not cause too many consumers’ fraud motives, how to deal with certain cases?
The method of turtle doves recycling is to establish a credit supervision and punishment mechanism:
1) Communication system: By cooperating with Alipay, consumers who have discovered ordering and counterfeiting will be included in the sesame credit score calculation.
2) Industry greylist alliance: Cooperate with companies such as idle fish and beluga to record consumers with a history of fraud and fraud, and reduce their remuneration in the future recycling business.
For the development direction, Lu Yan said that the first thing to do now is to accumulate samples, and gradually improve the algorithm’s calculation accuracy through the analysis of 200,000 samples. In the future, when the used clothes recycling business is formed, used book recycling and 3C product recycling will be the next direction to expand. Like old clothes, old books have natural advantages in terms of volume, materials, and other aspects, and many books have barcodes.
It is reported that Turtle Dove Recycling was established in 2015 and started as a community post logistics service. This year, it transformed the recycling of used clothes. So far, 4,700 recycling bins have been rebuilt, and each recycling bin can generate 1 DAU per day, and currently accumulates 10,000 registered users. The founder of Lu YiWorked in the field of delivery counters and community stations for six years.
The advantages of online recycling are convenience, efficiency, and low cost, but the challenges also exist. That is how to verify the problem of billing and fraud.
By ordering, through big data analysis, if it is found that the same consumer generates high-frequency placing behavior within a day, you can raise a warning and follow up with manual picture verification; for counterfeiting, due to image recognition, currently only recognition Volume, and can not identify whether the clothes or old newspapers wrapped in the bag, technically there is no cost-effective solution. Although a single return of about five yuan will not cause too many consumers’ fraud motives, how to deal with certain cases?
The method of turtle doves recycling is to establish a credit supervision and punishment mechanism:
1) Communication system: By cooperating with Alipay, consumers who have discovered ordering and counterfeiting will be included in the sesame credit score calculation.
2) Industry greylist alliance: Cooperate with companies such as idle fish and beluga to record consumers with a history of fraud and fraud, and reduce their remuneration in the future recycling business.
For the development direction, Lu Yan said that the first thing to do now is to accumulate samples, and gradually improve the algorithm’s calculation accuracy through the analysis of 200,000 samples. In the future, when the used clothes recycling business is formed, used book recycling and 3C product recycling will be the next direction to expand. Like old clothes, old books have natural advantages in terms of volume, materials, and other aspects, and many books have barcodes.
It is reported that Turtle Dove Recycling was established in 2015 and started as a community post logistics service. This year, it transformed the recycling of used clothes. So far, 4,700 recycling bins have been rebuilt, and each recycling bin can generate 1 DAU per day, and currently accumulates 10,000 registered users. The founder of Lu YiWorked in the field of delivery counters and community stations for six years.