Sorting waste at the point of origin (our homes, communities, stores, businesses, etc.) is a key practice to increase the volume of recycling in general. In Asuncion and its metropolitan area, this is an uncommon practice, and its widespread adoption is part of the collective action dilemma of recycling. To facilitate the adoption of this practice, a crucial factor is the trust relationships within the community and between the community and the waste-pickers. The experience we share in this post explores this side of the dilemma: How can we facilitate waste sorting at the point of origin?

Enter Wastebaskets 2.0

According to our hypothesis, enabling waste sorting requires stronger trust relationships among members of the community and between and the waste-pickers and the communities where they are currently collecting recyclables: the stronger the trust, the greater the willingness to sort.

Our hypothesis about waste sorting at the point of origin focusses on trust relationships among community members and between them and external waste-pickers.

In order to experiment and learn about this premise, we joined the Light Urban Interventions Competition, which sought to rethink the city through citizen participation, promoting modifications of the urban landscape that are easy to put together and dismantle and that invite people to live and experience the city differently. Nine different interventions were installed across a single street in Asunción, Juan de Salazar Avenue, located in a traditional neighborhood of the city center. Among them was AccLabPy’s intervention: Wastebaskets 2.0

By adapting the city’s already existing waste baskets we promoted a solution for one of the issues that hinders waste sorting: households’ limited or inexistent access to adequate infrastructure for disposing recyclable waste. According to several studies, access to these facilities influences participation in recycling practices (Omram et al. 2009, González-Torre & Adenso-Díaz 2005, Lange et al. 2014). This also applies to waste-pickers, who see their quality of life (while working) improved in terms of more efficient logistics for collecting recyclable material and opportunities to establish direct interactions and trust with households.

Wastebaskets 2.0 adapt, at low cost, an existing infrastructure that is typical in Paraguayan sidewalks, repurposing it to create differentiated spaces for recyclables and non-recyclables. The goal is to move from the Traditional Design to the Adapted Design through the fabrication and installation of custom separation grids that divide the wastebaskets into sections that each accommodate at least one 100L waste bag.

The Wastebaskets 2.0 Toolkit

Another objective of this intervention was to make it easy to replicate. We created an Open Source DIY Toolkit that guides adaptation and implementation of the design for any other community that uses this type of infrastructure. This toolkit proposes 6 steps to facilitate its implementation and it is published under a Creative Commons license to enable reuse and adaptation for new experiences. The toolkit was developed following our pilot experience, an intervention of 12 wastebaskets which we documented and selected through the following steps:

What we learned about recycling through our “light intervention” in Asuncion’s urban landscape?

The wastebasket experience allowed us to closely observe how a simple change in the urban landscape creates new dynamics of participation and collective action. To assess our experience, we organized monitoring days, a survey on recycling practices and trust, and interviews with participants. Here we share the most interesting lessons of this journey, admittedly leaving out much more that begs for further analysis and learning.

Awareness is not enough: in interviews and home visits, those who participated in the process proved to be very aware of the importance of recycling. In practice, however, recycling not priority when deciding how to invest time. Part of the problem seems to be related to poor standards and guidelines about waste sorting practices, limiting household’s motivation to acquire and maintain the habit. 

Peer examples motivate others: despite the low priority for recycling practices, we were able to observe an increase in the predisposition to participate after neighbors observed how their peers had newly installed and adapted wastebaskets. After we installed the first 5 modifications, several neighbors contacted us, asking to be part of the intervention, so much that we had to expand it to 12 wastebaskets. 

This reflects the importance of community interaction and trust relationships: when people observe positive experiences among trusted neighbors, they are more willing to participate in that experience. 

This is a fundamentally structural problem: another lesson from our intervention highlights the need to optimize, codify, coordinate, and integrate the different waste picking and management services and infrastructures, both formal and informal. This integration must consider carefully how much willingness families show to interact and use informal waste-picking services, and even pay for them.

Incentives play an important role: we have also observed that our participants’ motivation increases when families receive infographics or other resources that facilitate waste sorting, such as differentiated waste bags, something that has already been noted in research that evaluated how external incentives (such as prizes) have an influence in recycling behavior. 

Waste sorting starts inside the house: sorting at the point of origin involves rethinking the internal waste management system of each home, so that recyclable material has room to accumulate up to a certain point where it makes sense for someone to come pick it up. Having access to guides, tools, space, and appropriate practices for each individual home waste management experience is a key factor in this collective action dilemma.

There is awareness, but not as much knowledge: finally, we also noted that there is a very limited understanding about the usefulness of each material that can be recycled, what can and cannot be recycled in Paraguay’s the waste management value chain and about the existence and use of new services and infrastructures (such as these wastebaskets or collective waste sorting containers that are installed in some communities). Part of the intervention needs to introduce ways to convey key information on how to sort, who collects, who recycles, what is recycled, and where.

In conclusion, prototyping a new infrastructure by slightly intervening the urban landscape at a low cost allowed us to identify more precisely the need for participation and involvement of community members to promote recycling as a collective action. In addition to its ease of replication, Wastebaskets 2.0 can be a way to enhance community empowerment through participatory mapping and civic engagement.

One of the next steps in this process is to start experimenting with a more direct link between homes and waste pickers. We are designing upcoming pilot projects that would allow us to integrate these lessons, the use of adapted wastebaskets, and the maps generated with the waste pickers from the San Francisco neighborhood to build an integrated system of sorting at the point of origin, collective coordination among waste-pickers and direct interaction with households to improve logistics. Stay tuned for this pilot and our future posts!

Lea este blog en español aquí.