UI/UX design for Recicla2, a recycling rewards app in El Salvador

How do you design a recycling app with points and rewards?

UI/UX design and prototyping Mobile app interface design Onboarding and habit-formation flows Rewards catalog and points economy Collection center map and finder Community leaderboards Illustration system and mascot Interactive prototype in Figma

Recicla2 is an app for El Salvador that turns recycling into points, and points into rewards. You take your material to the nearest collection center, identify yourself with your ID number or a QR code, and the pounds you drop off become a balance you can spend on a bicycle, headphones, a food voucher or a raffle entry.

Nobody recycles because an app asks them to. They recycle when the reward is concrete and the next step is obvious. So the whole design question was how to make an environmental habit feel like a game you're already winning.

Four screens to explain a complete habit

The onboarding doesn't describe features, it teaches the cycle: collect plastic at home, find the nearest center on the map, show your QR at the counter, watch your points turn into rewards. One idea per screen, an illustration on each, and a progress bar that shows the end is near. The mascot — a smiling planet — holds the tone so the app never sounds like an institutional campaign, and green is used to mean progress: the button you tap, the points you earn, the pin on the map.

Points, rewards and a leaderboard for your municipality

The product covers the entire cycle: the home screen with your balance and the rewards within reach, the map of collection centers, the rewards catalog with the exact point cost of each, the wallet that shows how much a point is worth in dollars, the ranking of the top recyclers in your municipality with friends you can invite, and your recycling history with the date, the pounds and the recycler that received them.

It was delivered as an interactive Figma prototype on a consistent component library, so the rewards economy could be tested with real users before building a single screen.

AN ENVIRONMENTAL HABIT THAT FEELS LIKE A GAME YOU'RE WINNING