UNAIR NEWS – Ksatria Airlangga has made another achievement for the alma mater. Sukma Jenny Emadina Putri, a Political Science student of UNAIR Faculty of Social and Political Sciences (FISIP) successfully won First Place in the 2022 Youth-led Innovation Lab (YIL) for Green Entrepreneurship in East Java on Sunday, October 30, 2022.

To UNAIR NEWS (3/11/2022), Jenny said that she came up with the idea of “Refull”, a platform to minimize household plastic waste.

“I want to solve the waste problem in Surabaya, which produces 400 tons of waste per day where 70 percent of which is household waste. As a Political Science student, I thought it was irrelevant to the City Government’s goal of refusing single-use plastic,” she said.

Addressing the issue, Jenny and her partner explored Refull platform to meet the household’s needs, such as providing bath soap, detergent, dish soap, and many more. Through the website platform, customers get to refill their household needs with a one-step payment to prevent plastic waste production.

Jenny expanded her idea by considering the business and environmental ecosystem in B2B. She invited the SME entrepreneurs to supply Refull’s raw materials for local economic empowerment.

It minimizes the impact of environmental pollution as well. If it involves soap factories with larger production scales, it will give a greater negative environmental impact.

“Refull attempts to provide a simple concept of problem-solving from beginning to end, calculating the environment, creating a healthy economic circulation, and a stabilized revenue as we also design strategic legal planning. It is accessible for the community within their daily life,” she said.

For Jenny, the most interesting thing about digital business is the application and website development cost, which cannot be covered within the short term. However, strategic legal planning and several developmental movements can solve that.

“The website and application development has the highest cost. I heard UNAIR has the Start-up and Incubation Business Development Agency (BPBRIN). Hopefully, our idea will be developed sustainably there,” she said.

Jenny also asked her fellow students to give their all in every attempt. Being open to trying out every opportunity needs to be done.

Youth-led Innovation Lab (YIL) 2022 for Green Entrepreneurship is an open competition, allowing the participants to collaborate in cross-major. In this case, Jenny partnered up with her friend from Sepuluh Nopember Institute of Technology (ITS), Jinan Evaretta.

Author: Rafli Noer Khairam

Editor: Khefti Al Mawalia