Table of Contents
Setting the Scene
Koh Phangan island and Surat Thani province in Thailand host a significant number of NGOs and communities actively working on environmental solutions, such as managing waste and conducting weekly beach cleanups, providing environmental education, air and water quality monitoring, taking care of stray animals, and many more activities. While these organizations traditionally rely on conventional donations, personal funds, or grants if lucky, there is a tremendous opportunity to empower nonprofits in funding, brand recognition, and ultimately increase their impact by leveraging blockchain technology and web3 in general. This article will bring light on our first MVP aiming to pack and distribute the Impact Product done by the environmental community on Koh Phangan island, known for its efforts to combat the island's trash problem.
Koh Phangan’s Trash Troubles: An Impact Overview
The island faces an overwhelming amount of trash, especially after storms, which leave garbage debris on beaches, caught between rocks, and tangled in mangrove trees. Significant littering by visitors and residents, along with a lack of environmental awareness among working immigrants, escalates the issue. Additionally, the poor garbage segregation system and limited transport services for recyclables, combined with a growing population and increased construction, have led to trash being found along every roadside on the island. It is in everyone's interest to ensure that trash is properly disposed of, as improper disposal leads to trash burning in incinerators and households on the island, which dramatically worsens air quality. And here is where our story about Clean Phangan community begins.
The community has shown remarkable dedication over this period. They have organized and executed 224 weekly cleanups (and counting), often in locations that are not easily accessible. That resulted in the collection of over 90 tons of trash, with more than 20 tons sent for recycling. Over 5,000 volunteers have actively participated, demonstrating a collective commitment to environmental stewardship and community well-being.
This is how it started by story from Clean Phangan founder Alex: “For a long time, I worked as a journalist, and perhaps that's why I got used to looking for answers that naturally arise from life itself. I often worried that my beloved island of Phangan (Thailand) was drowning in trash. Whenever I visited one of the beaches littered with plastic, I tried to clean it up, collecting and hauling away a few bags of plastic bottles. Then I calculated that it would take me about seven years to clean just a small patch of shoreline on my own. One day, I invited some friends to join me in the cleanup... That's how our movement "Clean Phangan" was born.”
Blockchain Meets Cleanups: A Solution for Impact
To address funding challenges and create an additional funding source, thereby increasing Clean Phangan's impact, we have devised a solution leveraging blockchain technology and web3.
The first step in this approach is to acknowledge the tangible impact Clean Phangan has on the island by removing waste and promoting environmentally friendly actions, and to bring this knowledge to the Clean Phangan community as well.The second step is to pack the produced impact into a digital Impact Product. This involves collecting and quantifying the environmental benefits of the cleanup efforts and presenting them in the shape of sellable items.The final step is to sell our Impact Products to individuals and organizations interested in supporting and participating in these initiatives—impact investors. It is crucial that buyers understand the full value of the item they are investing in. This is also a contribution to Koh Phangan activists’ efforts, so the investor is treated as a person who created the impact as well.
Laying the Foundation: Onboarding for Impact
After the idea was born, our team collaborated with on-ground activists from ReFi Phangan to support Clean Phangan's onboarding process. ReFi Phangan's task was to help the cleanup community understand the benefits of this initiative. The community needed to grasp the concept that their impact could be packed as an Impact Product and sold on the market. Each part of the impact would be represented as an on-chain illustration of a lizard, serving as a permanent validation of their efforts. This on-chain presence was expected to significantly expand the circle of contributors to Clean Phangan's ongoing and future initiatives. They believed in the potential they saw and the result is here, presented as the Impact Product where most of the sales go to support their ongoing initiatives.
Crafting Impact Product: The Anatomy of Our Impact Product Collection
The Clean Phangan Impact Product features 500 unique, hand-drawn NFT illustrations of lizards on the Optimism chain. The creation process involved several important stages.First, the design. After extensive team discussions, we settled on sketches of lizards. This creature represents adaptability and resilience, qualities that align perfectly with Clean Phangan's mission. Lizards thrive in diverse environments and regenerate when injured, symbolizing the community's commitment to restoring and sustaining Koh Phangan's natural beauty.The artwork was created in Procreate, resulting in over 200 layers featuring various backgrounds, lizard bodies of different colours, accessories, and clothes. These layers were then algorithmically combined using the open-source NFTCHEF art generator. Learn more about the technical details of this process on the dedicated Github repository. The generation process produced 500 image files and their corresponding metadata. The tokens are divided into three tiers of impact: Common, Rare, and Legendary with different Impact Values. The team then implemented a smart contract detailing the various rarities and prices of the tokens. It’s a random mint, meaning you won’t know which image you’ll get within a tier.
Below is an example of the metadata content tier-bounded traits and general for the whole collection. It contains all the impact product information about Clean Phangan, plus it provides the owner with Impact Value details, which will be significant with the launch of the Impact Marketplace.
The metadata structure includes general traits across all tiers, such as:
Impact: The type and amount of impact being represented
Actions: The specific activities performed. Beach and Jungle cleanup weekly
Field: The area of impact. Environmental Actions
Entity: The organization behind the impact. Clean Phangan community
Type: The type of Impact Product. Impact NFT And tier-specifit traits, such as:
Rarity: Common, Rare, and Legendary
Impact Value: 1, 3, and 5 respectively. These values reflect the amount of impact produced by Clean Phangan and the rarity of each NFT within the collection.
Funding Impact: How Your Contributions Are Allocated
The smart contract for the collection specifies the distribution of funds across four wallets, with the majority going to the Clean Phangan Optimism wallet.
Invest in Impact: The Benefits of Impact Product For Owners
Clean Phangan Impact Product allows you to transparently and meaningfully support crucial environmental projects. You become a part of the regenerative economy and an essential element of tangible impact on Koh Phangan's ecosystem. By owning a Clean Phangan Impact Product, you join a global community dedicated to positive change. Your on-chain reputation building via IRL Impact Rank and bounded Impact Value. As you accumulate more Impact Products with higher Impact Value, your rank increases, fostering a sense of achievement and belonging. Additionally, IRL Impact Rank provides benefits according to rank. Impact Products also enable you to utilize the Impact Marketplace mechanics to earn APY rewards and community drops.
Join today and be a part of this impactful journey. Visit our mint page on Optimism and make a difference.
