makeshift

The design of the waste system, like many of the systems we depend on every day, is more or less invisible. Very few of us really know anything about where our waste goes. It is, after all - waste - we'd rather take it for granted. But at the same time, we are increasingly aware of the disastrous environmental consequences our waste has. But 'recycling' has worked its way into the conventional wisdom without really being subjected to local interrogation. In order to really think about what recycling waste might mean, we need to strip off some of the confusing myths and red-herrings that surround it.

RECYCLING IS A GREEN ISSUE

A huge assumption which overrides our conception of waste is the persistent association between recycling and 'green'ness. It is an easy shorthand that tidies the issue away into a neat vacuum, and disconnects our perception of recycling from the real complexities of its environmental impact. Even the phrase 'green' is disconcertingly honest about its deceit: it replaces genuine environmental awareness with an empty aesthetic; a colour. Today we are constantly bombarded by the banal iconography of 'green' - a moralised smoke screen behind which almost anything could be happening. In Sheffield at least, the moral line between recycling and not recycling is far from being black and green. Waste systems are, in reality, defined by all of: politics, psychology, class & culture divides, value systems and above all, economics.

RECYCLING IS SOMETHING YOU HAVE TO PERSUADE PEOPLE TO WANT TO DO

By moralising waste, we have created an environment in which many people believe that the only way to increase the amount of recycling is to persuade those who do not recycle towant to make the sacrifice of time and effort which they assume to be an inevitable part of recycling. There is some unwillingness to admit that recycling is almost exclusively a middle-class phenomenon - which depends on a particular set of values and privileges (such as owning a car). Some are prepared to go to extraordinary lengths of enforce these moral values in those who do not share them: using advertising, awareness campaigns, 'education'  programmes, taxes and even surveillance and draconian punishments for those who do not recycle. 

All this assumes that the system is, in design terms, perfect - and it is the people that are deficient. In fact, a survey by Sheffield Homes revealed that the vast majority of those in council-rented housing (even estates where conventional black-bag systems are struggling) were willing to recycle. Clearly then, there is a gap between what we say we'd do and what we actually do - and that, I'd argue, is a design gap. Investing our efforts into behaviour change may be money thrown away when there is a huge gain to be made up in the design of the system itself, and we should probably look at that before we go about redesigning people's minds.

RECYCLING IS SOMETHING EXTRA TO THE DEFAULT

The introduction of recycling policy has only ever been incremental. As a result, it's considered normal for recycling bins (blue, green, red...) to be issued as extra bins on top of the standard black bin. Apart from the resultant 'bin rash' - this approach creates a condition in which recycling becomes counter-intuitive:

Firstly the total volume of all the bins at any time is actually larger (even if the increase in bins is offset by less frequent collections), so recycling seems like adding waste, not subdividing it. Secondly, and more crucially, it articulates recycling as an extra to the default, which is often harder to access and empty. In our day to day lives, we are too busy to think too much about waste, so we inevitably gravitate towards the default - the low-effort black bin. If recycling is to be integrated into waste, we need to see it is a profound evolution in the way that the waste is 'normally' disposed of. In other words, we need to redesign the 'default'.

WASTE STRATEGIES

The School of Architecture six-week Live project for Sheffield Homes was an intense research exercise into the underlying dynamics of the city's waste logistics, bringing together a messy collection of approaches ranging from work-shadowing to economic scenario planning, but it was nonetheless tied back to these central questions and principles. How might we begin to put together a collection of possible future strategies for waste management in UK cities? 

1. Redesign the Default Thaler and Sunstein, in their book Nudge, introduce the idea of 'choice architectures' - that the environment in which we make choices is always (whether we know it or not) designed. In the case of recycling, that choice is not a fair one. With a nearby black bin competing with the time and extra effort required to go about recycling. So by moving the point of choice to the point of disposal (say, the kitchen bin) designers can create an environment in which it is just as easy (or hard) to recycle as it is to not recycle.

On reflection, this seems pretty obvious. Although we looked at the design of cheap, space-saving recycling bins (including the 'S-Door' - a time-generous interface for collecting waste through the front door) it's not about the design of bins. It's about the idea that council's and ALMO's might find much more leverage (effectiveness per cost) by providing free point-of-disposal sorting bins to every household.

2.Redesign the Infrastructure Particularly in the case of 1960's high-rise estates, it would be prohibitively expensive to retrofit existing waste-chutes to handle multiple waste-streams. An alternative system involves 'time-sampling' the existing chutes - using a button operated input device at the chute-head to control a mechanical sorter at the chute-foot - allowing the single chute to be used for several different types of waste. Once again, all the choices become equal at the point of disposal.

3. Redesign Communications  Historically, waste schemes are burdened by their reliance on 'one size fits all' solutions. Having arrived at the idea of introducing an information feedback-loop from estate managers to residents as a positive psychological tool, part of the team realised they were inadvertently looking at a means of providing continuous feedback, which would allow pilot schemes to be matched to specific estates with a much finer brush - creating the opportunity to creative virtuous (communal) feedback loops in service provision. 

4. Design a Waste Economy Most profoundly, of course, we are forced to reconsider the very idea of 'waste' itself - the idea that we can extract 'raw materials' ad infinitum, and use them rather inefficiently before burying or burning them. Implicit within the concept of 'waste' is the assumption that there is somewhere else that it can go (In the case of the UK, that may currently be Asia). But clearly, planet earth has no waste chute, so it has go somewhere. Paradoxically, we must be hoping that what we are sending away in fact has some value.

It is an odd product of Britain's political history that we see 'waste' as a single topic or problem, which can be contracted to a single organisation, or designed as a single system. We would never try to impose the same level of organisational simplicity on, for example, supply. How we supply ourselves, with what, from where, and how often has become a matter of societal expertise. We are good at it - in fact we are almost certainly too good at it: Shopping has subsumed leisure, culture, public space... But the complexities of supply are understood as market complexities, where demand, desire, brand, lifestyle, logistics and ethics compete. The final destination of the consumption pattern is the house. Beyond the house - suppliers lose interest. 

THE WASTE DIVIDE

We don't (yet) see waste in the same way. We don't yet see houses as commercial units for the production of valuable 'waste'. The big difference is that over the last century, the central mantra of supply has been choice. The ability to choose between products not just in and of themselves, but increasingly for the 'ethical' choices they represent: "Fair trade", "Organic", "Local".  The first, and most obvious thing to point out about these is that this kind of choice is made according to moral value systems, and those value systems belong almost exclusively to the upper / middle class. They are a green-chic gloss over the core reality: That these choices are luxury products, completely inaccessible and value-less for about one third of the UK population. The same can be said of the 'choices' introduced to the waste market. As unpalatable as it may seem, "recycling" and its moralisation has become a think-lite moral luxury, assuaging the guilt of the relatively well-off, but of little or no concern to everyone else. It is an exclusively Nigella / Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall class phenomenon. 

COMMUNAL PRODUCTION

If the city is a factory, with each household manufacturing a commodity called 'waste' - we are expecting the workers to work without pay. In fact, we are even expecting them to pay for the pleasure of their sacrifice. At present only a tiny minority of waste materials are profitable (there has been a sharp increase in the theft of lead from church roofs for sale as 'scrap'), but that may well shift with the rising price of oil in the next 20 years. Whether or not the deployment of municipal incinerators and anaerobic digesters (means to reconcile environmental targets with the requirements of contractors' profits) delays this shift or accelerates it is up for debate, but it hints at an increasing scope for entrepreneurs and non-profit community organisations to intervene upstream of the major waste contractors and siphon off the most profitable household waste commodities.

One fairly clear conclusion is that as architects and designers we are going to have to expand our dealing with waste beyond the location and appearance of bins. We need to see waste not in terms of objects, but as a set of resource-flows which do not end in the kitchen. This doesn't mean that bins should become the centre of attention - part of our current confusion lies in the bizarre tendency to make bins into foreground cultural artifacts - but it does mean we have to see communal waste production, and its impact upon our environment, our time and our finances as being much more central to personal well-being than has ever previously been fashionable.

'System Default' was the product of a six-week Live Project at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture. It looked at the waste disposal system in Sheffield, and in particular future strategies for waste design on council-owned flatted estates. 

Client: Sheffield Homes (An Arms-Length Management Organisation, managing council-owned housing in Sheffield)

Project Team: Romain Arnoux / India Aspin / James Kenyon / Mike Swiszczowski / Peter Sofoluke / Alastair Parvin / Sarah Bryan / Oliver Cartwright / Cristina Cerulli (tutor) / Tom Kangro / John Pillar