Despite decades of efforts and the imminent exhaustion of landfill space, Singapore’s National Recycling Program (NRP) only diverts a miniscule 2% of domestic waste from incineration. Informal recyclers, including the traditional karang guni, recycle nine times more domestic waste, yet are typically considered an outdated, vanishing trade. In this paper, I present results-in-progress from an ongoing collaboration between anthropologists and engineers to redesign, rather than replace, karang guni traders and other informal recyclers. Whereas design is typically oriented to creating future innovations, and anthropology towards understanding the (recent) social past, we have drawn on the emerging practice of design anthropology to creatively assemble traditional practices with cutting-edge technologies in new ‘prototypes of the social’. I will describe the design and development of our recycling app for smartphones, Honk!, and share what we have learned so far from the app pilot.