This project focuses on the design prompt: design a way to reduce materials consumption through repairing, recycling, or reusing.
My group and I had brainstorming session where we'd write and draw ideas on post its in a rapid succession. The goal was to generate as many ideas as we could in a 10 minute session. We believed that we'd get the craziest and best ideas from having a short session versus a prolonged one. From this, we determined that we wanted to improve the flaws in the current recycling system.
To tackle this issue, we wanted to ask others in many various communities what they know about and would be willing to do when it comes to a new recycling system. We had over 550 responses, and over 97% of them said they would be willing to use a multi-bin system for recycling. Nearly a 1/3 of respondents didn't know that recyclable items were labeled on a 1-7 system, and 81.5% don't know what any of the numbers mean. Clearly, the current recycling system is too complicated for the average person to take the time to learn how to properly recycle objects.
We decided to pursue a multi-bin recycling approach. As a group, we generated different kinds of symbols to see if maybe there exists a label that would resonate best with the average person.
We surveyed the same 563 people from before and received a lot of feedback on these designs. They all wrote one sentence responses regarding to color, shape, and form of our logos. A consistent theme among these responses is that the simpler, the better. They'd rather have the current logos be slightly modified than completely changed all together because they don't want to try to learn something new either due to time or motivation.
Learning from our feedback, rather than completely redesigning the logo, we thought about how to make it easier to know how to dispose objects with the current system. We wanted to focus on making current recycling more efficient, so we decided on a 4-bin system: glass, paper, plastic/metal, and trash. The reasoning behind dividing the materials in this way is because it is more efficient to separate recyclables before having to do so when at the plant.
Further, an important component of our system is that is adaptable for many cities. The problem with types of recyclables is that not all places can recycle certain plastics, which lead recycling centers to throw the entire collection into the trash. Thus, we suggest that municipalities foster a multi-bin system that will label their plastics bin with the numbers that are able to recycled on it. As the video above suggests, we'd like for this solution to be able to be tailored to a community's capablities. We want this to be easy for the average person to read when looking at our bins and easy for recycling centers to more efficiently recycle. The ultimate goal of this final prototype is to increase the amount recycled as well as make the process easier for all parties involved.
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