Designing what nobody wants to see
How can design help build a waste management system that prioritizes sustainability and is better integrated with the people who make it work?
By Lautaro Aragón, Nadir Chioino, and Lucía Salem
In a recent project, we learned that designers can help transform the way people perceive and manage their waste. We had a lot of questions about how the traditional process worked, and so we conducted twelve in-depth interviews with residents in Lima’s Miraflores district about their relationship with waste, how it’s generated, and how they dispose of it. We also spoke to doormen of some of the neighborhood buildings, the manager of the recycling program in the Miraflores Municipality, and the president of the Association of Formal Recyclers, which carries out recycling in the district.
What we learned was that the process was invisible to many people, so we tried to look at how each part contributed to the big-picture.
Residents don’t think twice about where their waste is going.
For residents, the waste disposal system in their district is something that is largely invisible to them. The people we interviewed did not know where their trash went — the responsibility with their waste ends when they put it inside a bag and leave it on the street for it to be collected.
“I take down the bags to the building basement. After that I don’t know what happens to them. The doorman takes care of that.” — Gabriela, Miraflores resident.
Officially, each district’s municipality is responsible for making the system they manage run smoothly. It turns out that each system is made up of several different actors working, and each is disconnected from the others. In many cases, these actors are not even recognized by the municipality or the neighbors, and they work independently.
Recycling is not institutionalized and gets done by independent workers.
Trash collection services may or may not include the collection of recyclable materials. Each municipality has discretion over whether it chooses to collect recyclables. In the Miraflores district, the people who collect recyclable waste are not employees of the municipality and do not get paid for this service that they perform. Instead, associations of “formalized” (previously informal) recyclers get permission from the municipality to collect the recyclable materials from that district in an organized and regulated manner. The recyclers benefit when they sell the materials they collect and split the earnings.
When we widened our lens to see all of Peru, we observed that “informal” recyclers make up 90 percent of all the recycling that takes place in the country. These recyclers separate valuable materials from trash to sell them to companies that process or transform them before re-inserting them back into the system — with new value. Some companies buy these materials and others transform them. Both work with formal and informal recyclers.
In Lima, most of the informal recyclers tour the streets and dumpsites, and rummage in the trash. In many other cases, people who work inside peoples’ homes, such as cleaning and security staff, separate these materials where they work and bring them home to sell them later on. Some of the people who collect trash from the municipality rummage inside the garbage bags — to pocket these valuable materials intended for the recycling crew — so they can sell them in recycling plants for their own profit.
People don’t care about what they can’t see.
During our research, we realized that people don’t think twice about where their waste goes because they simply can’t see it. Without trash or recycling containers, there are no visible signs of this system in people’s daily lives. The garbage truck comes at night, and informal recyclers rummage through the trash hidden from neighbors and the municipality. Even when recycling is going on inside homes, many homeowners don’t even know that it is happening — or don’t care where the waste is going.
“Sometimes I hear that the cleaning lady crushes bottles upstairs, but I don’t know what she does with them, I suppose she sells them.” — Marcela, Miraflores resident.
Our feeling is that people don’t care about what they cannot see. This gives people the luxury to dismiss or remain unaware of any negative impacts that this deficient system creates for the environment and for the recyclers.
Why do we hide waste management?
The fact that trash is invisible clearly has some benefits. Waste is, by definition, everything that we have discarded or deemed with no value and everything we do not want to have any more. In many cases, this trash is dirty and contains food that is decomposing. You need to get rid of it. It’s also true that people value immediacy.
So the moment a resident put his or her trash bag outside the home, it becomes someone else’s responsibility. Officially, it is useless to them. This dynamic enables the resident to consider the task done so they can direct their attention elsewhere. But, interestingly, it also implies that people trust the people who are in charge of collecting and treating the trash. For better or for worse, the status quo requires little effort and minimizes friction for residents.
Why does an invisible waste management system cause problems?
Most services strive for immediacy and simplicity. We are so used to consuming and discarding easily that we do not find moments to stop and think. What is happening to everything we consume? Where does it all go? How does this system work? Is it good for my city? Perhaps we worry for a moment, but then trust in the system and continue about our daily lives. After all, the trash disappears. It must be in good hands.
Not always. There are many problems hidden in this invisible system. Both in the disposal of general waste and in the separation of materials for recycling, we found serious issues and dangers for society: 80 percent of districts in Peru dispose of all or some of their waste to informal open-air dumpsites, and only 29 percent have a formal program to separate waste for recycling. Lima has 150 critical points of trash accumulation that are strong threats to public health.
In addition to the public health threats, this precarious system of disconnected agents creates environmental and economic inefficiencies. Because municipalities don’t have integrated systems of recycling in each district, many recyclable materials go undetected and end up in general trash. It doesn’t help the stability of income for informal collectors, either. Each informal agent acts independently and sells whatever he or she can get to the recycling companies. That means a considerable number of people have unstable and insufficient earnings from this industry. It’s also true that even when recyclers choose to engage in formal recycling, other informal actors steal part of the waste that they should be collecting, reducing their income and their job stability further. In short, no one is earning much for their labor and everyone has to find complementary income, which perpetuates the “halfway done” state of the recycling system. It’s a loop.
In a citywide survey conducted in 2017, 27 percent of people mention “public cleanliness” as one of the three main problems of the city. But improvements in trash collection were seldom mentioned in the campaigns for city mayor this year. Stopping crime and building great transportation infrastructure to reduce traffic congestion get a lot more play. People do care about trash and cleanliness, but when it’s out of sight, no one treats the issue with much consequence. Case in point: There are serious problems with garbage in Lima, but 12 municipalities have reduced their budget for solid waste management this year.
How do we put eyes on the problem and fix it?
The answer may be to make waste semi-visible. In Europe and in the U.S., people must separate recyclable materials into containers for this purpose. It’s a constant reminder to sort your trash! In Japan, extremely complex garbage sorting systems work so that neighbors can easily identify when someone has not sorted their trash correctly. These initiatives hint at workable solutions.
Based on our findings and a review of best practices in the design of digital products and services, we identified critical areas for improvement in the waste-disposal experience. They involve the people both on the back end and the front end of the service.
Create visible contact points and involve users in the process.
Services generate trust in their users through the points of contact they have with them — and even through the friction that users face. There are clear steps we can take.
Bring the process to the people.
- Have a clear and friendly in-person onboarding to the service: Teach people about the trash collection process and underscore their environmental responsibilities.
- Make collection more visible: Add bins in the home and in public spaces, and designate pick-up spots. Slowly this will let people see that “waste” is part of sustainability.
- Make recyclers visible: Mark the hand-off moment in which residents put their trash out and formal and informal actors take this as their cue to begin.
Add friction so people notice what’s happening.
- Add feedback and generate friction: Adding a layer of intelligence to bins for recyclables would allow the service to communicate to users the type of waste they are throwing out or what treatment it undergoes. The goal is food for thought and changes in behavior.
- Adjusting the ease with which people can dispose of their trash: This could generate moments of pause and reflection that drive better waste management.
- Let things be traced: Force people to be accountable. Service Provider Companies that pick up garbage and recyclable materials from supermarkets are obligated to present certificates that explain what happens to waste at every point in the process. Municipalities can do the same with citizens’ waste.
Create tools that solve problems and support change.
- Give people waste management reports: If people are informed of the quantity and type of waste they generate, it may make them more conscious of their consumption habits.
- Add legitimacy for recyclers: You create a strong value proposition for recyclers by giving their job more visibility and dignity. Picking up recyclable trash is a job that has been repudiated for a long time. Making recyclers feel proud, so they want to formalize their role, and offer them training during this process.
- Create support channels: Give residents easy access to support centers, to generate trust. When someone has a problem, he or she should receive an immediate answer so they have peace of mind that their issue is being handled.
What does this mean for design?
This situation has clear ramifications into the practice of design. Automation and heavy use of technology seem to demand that design give a human face to these systems that are not visible or understandable for people. In this sense, the worries of design are geared towards how to know the user well enough to create a bridge between the technology working in the background and the feelings of users going about their lives in the foreground.
In the same way that in digital services it is important to design automated operations ethically, in analogue services it also becomes a crucial responsibility to ethically design the invisible surroundings of the people who make these services work.
