Increasing Household Recycling

Project: Recycle

Sector: Waste Management

Role: Service Designer

Design Brief: The design brief for this work was to work with our client to ensure that they were able to deliver on their key priorities to reduce the amount of household waste produced by residents, increase household recycling, and identify new sources of income from household waste materials.

What I did: I provided design direction as part of a three-strong project support team, which also included a project manager and one other designer. We worked closely with our client and their waste contractor in order to gain a complete understanding of the existing end-to-end waste system and its various touchpoints. Through a series of workshops, I was able to assist the project support team in engaging both the client and contractor in design thinking, leading to the formation of a strong working relationship with our client team. I provided design advice and guidance to the project support team and contributed towards the creation of a research plan. The research took the form of contextual interviews undertaken alongside the client team with a self-selected group of 25 residents, through which we were able to better understand customer behaviours and interactions with the waste services. We used interview transcripts and contextual photography in order to tell the user story and tease out key design insights. I lead the project team through a two-day synthesis workshop which resulted in the creation of both an insights document and customer personas. We used our newfound understanding of the practical barriers to recycling in order to design a 12-week prototype through which we were able to test two new waste collection services; the prototypes covered 200 homes and a range of different types of housing. Spending time building relationships with the people who lived in the streets that would be affected was a key factor in the success of the tests. The work of the project team was communicated to the client through weekly project meetings and infographics which I designed. At the end of the testing period, the project team interviewed residents in order to gain qualitative story-based feedback to complement the wealth of quantitate data being fed back via our client’s waste contractor. I was able to use footage shot during these doorstep interviews to create a 10-minute vox pop video which we used to present our key learning points to senior managers.

Outcomes:

Through the research, we were able to highlight new insights which our clients were not already aware of, and were not included in guidance issued to Councils by central government. Test results showed the potential for financial efficiencies, income generation and better service for the customer, which included:

Reduced waste to landfill by up to 30%
Increased dry recycling by up to 37%
Increased paper and cardboard recycling by up to 60%
Glass and Metal recycling increased by up to 31%
Recycling participation increased by up to 83% with those who had previously not recycled

Up to 50% of participants tried a new food collection service, which if scaled could equate to more than 11,000 tonnes of diverted food waste per year. A new county-wide service based on learning derived from the prototypes is planned to be launched soon.

Related Links:

Cardboard to be collected as part of new improved kerbside collection service – Shropshire Council Newsroom