Co-designing household-waste solutions
Overview
In 2017, SmartUp designed and facilitated a series of five co-design workshops on household-waste disposal and collection in Skopje, with UNDP support. Informal waste collectors, city and national institutions, the public communal-hygiene enterprise, licensed waste companies, civil society organisations, and citizens worked side by side, using human-centred design to find the root causes of the problem and to shape solutions together.
We built the process on a strategic workshop held in May 2017 and on qualitative ethnographic research with 73 in-depth interviews, including 48 citizens in six locations across the city. The result was a set of costed prototype concepts, along with a pathway for formalising informal waste collectors.
The challenge
Household waste at the start of the chain
A strategic workshop in May 2017 set the priority: how households separate, dispose of, and hand over their waste, from the kitchen, to the container, and into the container.
Behaviour or unmet need?
Many problems looked like poor citizen habits, but some were caused by needs that the existing waste-collection system did not address. Telling the two apart changed which solutions made sense.
Informal collectors outside the system
People who collect waste for a living are not recognised by the formal system, and had little space to present their needs in mixed workshops. An extra focus group was held with them.
Solutions that must be affordable
Some of the prototypes proved too expensive once costed, and participants recommended not pursuing them.
Activities and methods
We combined field research with five four-hour workshops (27 October – 30 November 2017) and a dedicated focus group, moving step by step from understanding the problem to testable solutions:
- Research first – a qualitative ethnographic study with citizens and affected groups gave the workshops an evidence base.
- Mapping the problem – participants split into three groups, one for each stage of household disposal (at home, from home to the container, in the container), and mapped challenges and first ideas.
- Finding root causes – groups separated citizen behaviour from needs the current system did not meet, and revisited their priorities.
- Generating solutions – the focus moved from challenges to ideas. Groups drafted 16 solutions, which were presented, evaluated, and scored.
- Building prototypes – the strongest ideas were developed into prototypes, combining useful elements from ideas that had not been voted through, with a user journey map for each.
- Planning delivery – groups defined time frames, action plans, communication activities, and tentative budgets.
- Hearing informal collectors – a separate focus group with ten informal waste collectors, joined by a civil society organisation they trust, reviewed the prototypes in plain language so that their input shaped the final concepts.
Impact and learning
The work produced prototype concepts along the household-waste chain. They are concepts for further development, not services already in operation:
- Sorting and composting organic waste – households separate organic waste in return for a lower bill or compost, piloted first with 200 households in collective housing, 25 in individual housing, a green market, and a school.
- Deposit-return machines for packaging – machines that scan codes on bottles and give back points or money. At an estimated 3,000–10,000 euros per machine, it would need a high initial investment.
- Bulky-waste removal – a social enterprise that collects old furniture, on demand for a fee and from public spaces next to containers.
- GARB mobile app – crowdsourced mapping of containers, illegal dumps, and sites for new containers. The app became Kanta.mk; see its own project page.
- Formalising informal waste collectors – collectors said they want formal employment and accept losing social support. We recommended a trusted intermediary organisation to employ them, with a pilot for up to 50 collectors planned for 2018.
Key lesson: every concept depended on bringing informal waste collectors into the formal system, so formalisation became the common thread and the first recommended next step.
Gallery
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