Cristhian Parra

24/03/2022

It touches on both our Formalization and Business Innovation Portfolio (by facilitating the work of informal waste pickers in Asunción) and our Transparency, Social Dialogue, and Participation (by enabling collective action at the community level).  

To build a circular economy and inclusive recycling system by facilitating the participation of the community in the collective action of recycling. 

How can we intervene the urban landscape and infrastructure to provide the necessary resources for sorting waste at origin, at low cost and taking advantage of resources that already exist?  

Academia: Catholic University of Asunción, Science and Technology School. Two students worked on the project as a way to gain insights for their master degree dissertations on the role of information technology in promoting behavioral change for a circular waste management. Civil Society: Collaborated with organizers of the Light Urban Interventions Contest were OCA y el ICPA/Goethe Zentrum Asunción, CalleCultura, and Centro Cultural Juan de Salazar y EnComún Private Sector: El Granel 

To prototype and test in the field a new version of urban wastebaskets that promote and facilitate waste sorting at the point of origin. 

Our hypothesis about waste sorting at the point of origin focusses on trust relationships among community members and between them and external waste-pickers. 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. As way to explore dynamics of waste sorting that could be a keyway to enable trusting interactions between waste pickers and families, we then set forth to explore how to facilitate waste sorting at the point of origin. The working hypothesis of this experimental intervention is therefore the following: If → transform available infrastructure for waste management at the point of origin to facilitate sorting (…) then → more families will start sort their waste at the point of origin.

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. 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.

The study unit are households along one identified street in the capital Asunción. 

For this intervention, the data we collected was entirely qualitative in nature, consisting of participant observations, 4 interviews with participant households, and 28 surveys we collected from houses that could potentially participate. In total, 12 wastebaskets were intervened and adapted with authorization from the families. 

3 months

A very rough approximation would be to say that 20% of the time of both Head of Experimentation and the Head of Exploration, plus 20% of the time of our Lead Data Analyst, went toward designing, installing new wastebaskets, analyzing, reporting and following-up on the results, throughout the duration of the experiment. 

Not enough data is available to fully validate it, but there are valuable learnings to share from analyzing observational and qualitative data we collected. 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.

The Light Urban Interventions methodology offers a quick way to make a small intervention that can have a high impact.  It does not offer, however, easy ways to insert experimental design into the mix to measure impact in a more systematic way. That said, it does offer a wealth of learning through observation and ethnography.  

3

Roughly, we spent $1000 in the whole intervention, including the materiales and a small team of students to conduct surveys and interviews. Other resources: time invested by AccLab Members (average or 2h-4h week over the full period of the intervention). 

Not yet, but we have published the toolkit for the intervention to be adapted and replicated by communities that share some characteristics in common with the contexto in which we had set this up in place. https://www.undp.org/es/paraguay/publicaciones/wastebaskets 

Possibly. The follow up to our “Mi Barrio Sin Residuos” experiment has suggested that making easier to have intermediate collection and accumulation points, managed by the community, can be an essential part of the process. The wastebaskets 2.0 offer an opportunity to test this type of collective actions.   We have also created a Toolkit to do your own Light Urban Intervention to adapt the wastebaskets of your community, available in English here: https://www.undp.org/es/paraguay/publicaciones/wastebaskets