UX Designer & Textile Graphic Artist
Rethinking Waste
A Food Recycling Proposal & its Digital Integration into an Existing Municipal Paysite
A concept project develop as part of U.N.T Interaction M.A program
My Role
Researcher/Product Designer/UI Designer
Time Frame
Six Months
Tools
Figma, Miro, Balsamiq,
Adobe Suite
Methods
User Interviews, Pier Review Studies, Sector Documentararies, YouTube, Affinity Mapping, Ethnographic Studies, Usability Testing
Context
Overview
The Problem
Every year $218 billion of potential revenue ends up in landfills across the United States. This municipal initiative examines the financial benefits of food recycling to municipalities, their citizens, and the waste management sector.
This document will also provide a high-level overview of the proposed solutions and illustrate the seamless integration of a digital solution into the existing municipal system.
I intend to take you through a journey that looks at the Solid Municipal Waste Management Industry globally and in the United States. I will highlight my research findings, the financial opportunities of food recycling, proposed solutions, and integrate a digital solution to an existing paying site.
To demonstrate the financial viability of a food recycling program and its digital integration into an existing municipal site.
Goals
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Identify the global and national challenges of the SMW sector.
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Provide a high-level overview of solutions, strategies, and implementation
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Illustrate the financial opportunity of food recycling
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Develop a digital solution that will illustrate the financial benefits of food recycling at the municipal level
Design Process
RESEACH
DISCOVERY
IDEATE
PROTOTYPE
ITERATE
Research
I sought first to understand the current state of the SMW industry through peer review studies, industry journals, and video documentaries. The goal was to find what's working, why it is, and the factors that lead to the successful adoption of the solution.
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I conducted semi-formal interviews and ethnographic observations after defining the target population using my research finding from my primary research. I focus on a population that would be more susceptible to implementing and adopting new waste management strategies
Discovery
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Globally and in the U.S, the SMW sector faces similar challenges. They range from shrinking landfill space, regulations, outdated infrastructure, and fluctuating commodities prices.
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In the U.S, the industry faces an accumulation of contaminated recycled material that they can't sell in the open market.
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The 70% projected population growth by 2025 will lead to the rising demand for agricultural and consumer goods, further straining the SMW sector and increasing the cost of services.
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There is no one-size-fits-all solution & strategy. Depending on local factors, a multi-level approach that focuses on accessibility, ease of the task, education, social-behavior re-education, user environment, and technology will be needed.
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Research indicates that programs that charge consumers by the amount of waste they produce effectively decrease waste generation by 60% in organic waste and 50% for other unsorted waste.​
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Municipalities with populations between 25k and 70k with a median income between 60k and 120k and property values between 200k and 500k are more receptive to implementing a food recycling program.
Benefits of Food
Recycling
Implementing a Pay as You Go program.
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Implementing a food recycling program increases the longevity of landfills and energy production of the waste management sector through their existing energy pipeline.
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Food recycling can lower the contamination rate in recycled products, making them a more desirable commodity in the global market.
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The public would benefit from a lower cost of services, any future investment by SMW organizations into their community, and for some individuals, the personal fulfillment of doing their part for their local environment.
The Market Opportunity
Today when we look at the overall U.S food supply chain, we can identify that residential municipalities are responsible for 43% of food waste in the supply chain. There is a market opportunity for municipalities and waste management organizations to partner and develop multi-level strategies that educate, encourage, and reward households that separate food waste from the point of origin.
System Impact
This diagram illustrates how a food recycling program can be integrated into the existing waste management infrastructure and the financial impact on its revenue stream.
Residential municipalities that meet the right variables will have a higher rate of ensuring a positive return in the initial investment required for the program.
Ideation
My Focus
From my findings, I develop several strategies that focus on helping municipalities adopt a food recycling program
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At the user or household level, the strategy focuses on education, behavioral, social, and environmental strategies.
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At the Municipal and Waste management level, the focus was on policy implementation to persuade households to join the program through rebates and other rewards that directly connect with participation.
Critical to the program's successful implementation is allowing households to choose how involved they want to be but penalizing them with higher cost or difficult waste pick-up options to incentivize involvement.
Due to time constraints, my focus will be on developing a digital solutions that will help incentivize and illustrate the benefits of participating in a food recycling program to a household. I will also demonstrate the integration of the digital solution into a municipal website.
Little Elm Municipal Site Overview
The Little Elm municipal site provides residents with information about their local government and community. It also facilitates payments for their waste and refuge services for the town.
The current site has limited features, with an information architecture that makes navigation challenging, poor information visualization, layout, and minimal type hierarchy.
Redesign Mockups
Prototype
Desktop
As part of the digital solution integration, I decided to redesign the site to improve usability, information architecture, navigation, overall layout, and improved interactions with the user.
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Part of the experience is to educate consumers about the correlation between food recycling and the program's financial benefits to participants.
Landing Page Changes & Rationale
Landing Page
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The decision to make the search bar the prominent part of the landing page derives from my research indicating that users who visit a municipal website already know what task or information they want to perform; all they need is to find it.
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I segmented information by the most common users that would visit the site, those who live in Little Elm, those who do business in Little Elm, and those who visit Little Elm.
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Finally, I took the most common task user would perform when visiting the site and placed shortcuts across the bottom page using large familiar icons.
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Dashboard & New Billing Experience
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The dashboard consists of shortcuts of the most common tasks users perform on the site, a carousel of widgets with a preview of the most common information users look for.
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The user sees a more detailed view of the chosen widget information below the carousel when a widget is selected
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A vital component of the new billing experience is educating the user on the correlation between waste production and waste collection costs. The goal is to incentivize participation and encourage users through social comparison strategies and reward loops.
Prototype
Mobile
The mobile application will have the same functionalities as the desktop application, with a few additional ones identified during my ethnographic observations.
Additional Functionalities
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Recycle symbol identifier - Utilizing the device's camera to help I.D. any recycling symbol on a package and see if your waste management services recycle the item.
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Notification - Users will get a weekly snapshot of their cumulative waste generation, how they compare to others in their municipality, their reward/rebate progression status when waste is collected.
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Like the desktop application, users can customize the amount of information they want or prefer to see by adding or deleting widgets.
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Users will have access to a marketplace to purchase items to help reduce waste and recycle more efficiently.
What I learn
Through this process, I discovered that waste management is a profitable business that will face several challenges as populations grow, living standards improve, and landfill space becomes limited.
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The waste management organizations that can adapt to the current and future challenges utilizing technology and critical key partnerships will bring greater value to their investors and society. This proposal is not easy to accomplish; the number of variables in the system makes it a complex task to tackle, but if we use the successful implementations of others as a road map, we have an excellent initial step.
Next Steps
If I were to continue with this project, my next steps would be to develop to run some usability testing. I would focus on further researching and testing strategies that focus on the user behavior at home and partner with an educational system to research educational strategies and implementations for school-age children. I would also like to study and define political strategies that would help pass food recycling legislation and develop financial strategies that will help clarify the financial investment needed to implement the proposal.