This piece is part two of a four part series on plastic waste management. Read part one here. Keep reading the Busara blog for parts three and four.

The plastic predicament is simple. The lightweight, cheap, durable material has been used in containers, bottles, drums, trays, boxes, cups, vending packaging, and more over the last 100 years, and is now a key solution in the global economy. However, with this convenience comes a huge waste challenge, detrimental to the environment. This is particularly evident in low-to-middle income countries like India and Kenya, where huge swathes of land are covered in waste landfills and water bodies are choked with discarded plastic. To meet this problem, a number of waste management interventions and initiatives to improve waste management have been developed in high-income countries like Australia and the UK.  For example, the UK government committed to a multi-year strategy aimed at a waste management target of net-zero emissions by 2050 through a variety of initiatives to minimize household waste, raise recycling rates and reduce the practice of landfilling among others.

It could be tempting to assume that this should make it easy for lower income countries like India and Kenya. They can simply implement these or similar regulations and initiatives that have already been proven to work. This assumption would be overlooking a critical factor – the contexts are unique and different. Context, it turns out, is everything.

Most interventions have limited generalizability beyond the context in which they were developed, tested and applied. What might work in Melbourne, Australia – a region with defined formal waste management systems and infrastructure, a skilled waste management/recycling workforce and a pro-recycling attitude – may not work in a city like New Delhi, India, where recycling is highly unregulated and relies on an informal and mostly untrained waste management workforce with limited capacity to contribute to recycling. There will exist vast differences in how people in every household think about waste management and recycling, what resources and infrastructure are available for recycling, whether plastic substitutes can be readily found, and the market for the products of recycling e.g making polyester from recycled plastic bottles.

Contextually-relevant waste management solutions seek to leverage on a deep understanding of these different contexts. They are embedded in existing waste management solutions and the ecosystem as it is to enhance its impact. This may involve, as an example, developing targeted messaging that resonates with these communities, providing regulations for informal waste collectors and highlighting values that the population in question holds dear through normative messaging.

How then do we develop effective waste management solutions?

By approaching the issue with a Human-Centered Design perspective. Human-Centered Design (HCD) is an iterative process of developing context-relevant solutions to a problem by collaborating with the people at the center of the issue. After all, who would know more about a problem than the people facing it? 

It is important to include such often-overlooked but essential actors as local communities,  informal waste collectors and scrap dealers to design relevant solutions to the waste management problem in LMICs. Their contributions are critical in understanding the problems they face in recycling/waste management, sharing local recycling and waste management knowledge, and developing ideal solutions to these identified problems.

The waste management and recycling research conducted by Busara in collaboration with TRANSFORM, in India and Kenya, is a wonderful example of just such an application of human-centered design to creating effective solutions to encourage recycling behaviors of individuals and communities in LMICs.

What would the process look like?

The HCD approach can be decomposed into three key stages: Inspiration (where you want to learn as about the problem and the context), ideation (where you identify opportunities for intervention and co-design potential solutions) and validation/implementation (where you bring your solution to real life to test, iteratively design and validate). 

Let’s break down how the transform team leveraged HCD to provide a clearer picture of the three phases.

Inspiration phase: The team conducted an extensive review of relevant literature, primarily focusing on research conducted in similar contexts to India and Kenya to get a better understanding of the issue. This was supplemented with extensive, on-ground qualitative research using focus group discussions and in-depth interviews with a variety of actors, such as waste collectors, scrap dealers, recycling enterprises and consumers in both countries.

Ideation phase: The team then conducted co-design workshops with these stakeholders to brainstorm ideas for contextually-relevant behavioral nudges (changes to the user’s environment that decisions are made in to encourage behavioral change without leveraging on penalties, mandates or sanctions) that may be incorporated into existing initiatives, built into new interventions or inform the development of generalized strategies. Waste collectors and scrap dealers, often overlooked by research, proved to be critical sources of information about the real local and national waste management system. At this phase the team was able to generate a laundry list of possible interventions – the good, the bad and the ugly. 

Validation/Implementation phase: These ideation sessions were followed by a series of prioritization sessions (to select the most effective and feasible solutions) and rapid prototyping sessions to pressure-test and refine the ideas for each country. For example, we found that the ideas that leveraged community engagement and awareness generation were the most effective at tackling the plastic problem within these target populations. This iterative designing and testing approach reduces the risk of failure during full roll-out by identifying key issues to be resolved. Some ideas developed during this phase include: 

• A training manual for informal waste collectors on waste segregation and management,
• Local associations for informal waste collectors to improve their collective efficacy and tackle the issue of formalization of their roles, 
• Storyboards for household-level pro-recycling awareness generation video, and 
• Easy-to-follow household recycling guides that provide daily recycling reminders and guidance for waste segregation. 

Prioritized and refined prototypes were then validated through workshops with public/private sector stakeholders and beneficiaries of the interventions.

Through this process and a lot of learning, we were able to develop a comprehensive playbook of user-centered and contextually-relevant interventions to the issue of inefficient waste management in Kenya and India.

In conclusion, HCD is a valuable tool for researchers across different sectors. By leveraging on its principles, researchers and implementers can get a deeper understanding of the local context and possible interactions between planned interventions and the target population. It also allows the design team time to course-correct and ensures that solutions you develop are relevant for the people, resonate with their needs and are embedded in their current conditions.

References

1. Willis K., Hardesty B., Vince J., Wilcox C. (2022). Local waste management successfully reduces coastal  plastic pollution. One Earth. 5. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2022.05.008
2. Sharp V., Giorgi S., Wilson D. (2010). Delivery and impact of household waste prevention intervention campaigns (at the local level). Waste Manag Res; 28:256. https://doi.org/10.1177/0734242X10361507
3. UK GOV (2018) Our waste, our resources: a strategy for England. GOV.UK Web. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5c18f11740f0b60bbee0d827/resources-waste-strategy-dec-2018.pdf.