Spend Less of Your Sunday Queuing at the Tip

A project came up for the Digital team around the use of the authority’s Community Recycling Centres (CRCs). That’s the tip, to most of us. The non-techies in the team went and did their thing: spoke to staff and visitors at the CRCs, observed, made notes, ideated (came up with ideas).

Sometimes after all of that, they’ll come up with ideas that don’t need a technical solution, but this time did, so it came to the techies in the team.

Currently, if someone rocks up to the site in, say, a van or with a big trailer, they’re given a form to fill in to declare that what they’re bringing is waste from their own home, not commercial waste. It makes a bottleneck — queues build up behind them while they do the paperwork

So, a new online form would allow people to make this declaration ahead of their visit, reducing queueing time for site users. For the back office, it cuts down on paperwork that needs filing and makes GDPR compliance easier.

Then another form would be needed for the site attendant doing the meet and greet at the front of the queue. This would take a registration number and return whether a declaration had been made, whether the vehicle had been banned because of the driver’s previous bad behaviour, and whether it had exceeded its permitted number of visits for the day. Then the attendant could tap a few buttons for types of waste being brought (e.g. mattresses, fridges, garden waste).

We had all this data being gathered. May as well do something with it. A dashboard! Pie charts, bar charts, tables all looking at the data in different ways. An easy way to show patterns of use for resource allocation. To spot misuse of the site by commercial users (Perhaps that person who’d dumped a dozen mattresses in the past month doesn’t live in a mansion?).

In show and tells with the service, we refined the dashboard to be as useful as possible, and with expert information governance guidance we made sure it’s GDPR compliant.

At this point in time, we are about to go into user testing. All being well the new system will be going into action in the autumn. Visitors to the site shouldn’t have to queue for so long. The service will be able to dramatically cut down their paper usage, free up space used for filing, and make more data driven decisions.