Refill

Refill, the UK’s leading campaign to prevent plastic pollution, partnered with us to rebuild their technology infrastructure from the ground up. The result is a digital ecosystem that cut operational costs by 95% while helping millions of users find refill stations across hundreds of thousands of locations globally, plus an innovative reusable cup lending programme.

The Challenge

Refill needed to evolve from a simple refill-station locator into a platform supporting multiple sustainability initiatives. Their legacy system was costly, inflexible, and unable to scale with the organisation’s ambitious environmental goals.

A New Backend

We rebuilt the backend on Google Firebase: a serverless architecture with real-time synchronisation across platforms, automatic scaling, enhanced security, and sub-second response times globally, at a 95% reduction in operational costs from the legacy system.

Native Mobile Apps

The customer and vendor apps are built with React Native and TypeScript. The customer app pairs a completely refactored mapping solution, hundreds of thousands of refill points, intelligently clustered, searchable, and usable offline, with QR scanning for cup checkout and returns, a digital wallet, and integrated payments. The vendor app handles real-time cup inventory, QR-based scan-in and scan-out, and automated payment reconciliation.

A Next.js admin panel ties the platform together: location management for global refill stations, real-time monitoring of every cup in circulation, vendor onboarding, and system-wide analytics and reporting.

The Return Cup Programme

The cup lending scheme we built lets customers borrow a cup with a QR scan and return it at any participating location, with deposits handled securely through Stripe and thousands of cups tracked in real time. The result is a measurable reduction in single-use cups.

Data and Impact

A custom ETL pipeline extracts data from Firebase, payment systems, and app analytics into Power BI dashboards: millions of plastic bottles saved annually, CO₂ prevented, cup circulation patterns, and programme ROI. The platform runs at 99.9% uptime and is ready for continued global expansion, and the cost savings go back into growing the network.

“The transformed platform has revolutionized our ability to scale our environmental mission. The 95% cost reduction has allowed us to invest more in expanding our network, while the new cup program has opened entirely new avenues for reducing single-use waste. The real-time analytics give us unprecedented insight into our impact.”

Refill

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