Turning trash into treasure.
MRF Workers remove plastic bag and other contaminants from the waste stream.
Setting the Scene
Eager to expand my design thinking skillset, I enrolled in MIT’s Mastering Design Thinking course in 2018. The class covered the new product development cycle as guided by design thinking.
The semester-long project would challenge me and 5 remote teammates to employ the methodology from research through to prototype design and production planning. As a sustainability-minded bunch, we wanted to develop a concept that would fuse a positive environmental impact with business viability while satisfying the three key dimensions of desirability, feasibility, and viability.
When we learned that Americans alone use 100 billion plastic bags annually, and that just 1% of plastic bags are recycled, we saw an opportunity to act.
Project Overview
Team // Gustavo Alarcon, Conrad Chartrand-Houlden, Andreas Dankelmann, John Matthews, Joe Nangle, Daniel Reed
Project Stakeholders // Recycling consumers, Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs), Curbside Haulers
Deliverable // Product brief with go/no-go decision
My Role // Project management, user research, concept development
Need Finding
Our first task was to observe and understand a human need. We decided to focus on recycling in our everyday lives.
Together, we collected dozens of observations and interviews from our coworkers, family, friends, and even some strangers in Whole Foods. Because the team was geographically distributed across North America, with teammates in Vancouver, California, Mexico, and Connecticut, we gathered a diverse range of input that helped us think beyond any single recycling system.
We compared notes, synthesized observations, and a widely shared problem presented itself: even savvy and devoted recyclers weren’t sure what to do with their plastic bags.
For thin-film plastics like shopping bags, plastic wrapping, and so forth, proper disposal practices can vary, with certain systems processing specially collected plastics and others diverting them to landfill. But the path of least resistance--simply tossing them in the bin was never the right option.
And this plastic bag problem wasn’t just on the consumer side, either.
Materials Recovery Facilities, or MRFs, as they’re often abbreviated (pronounced like “murphs”), are hubs for recycled materials. MRFs aggregate, sort, process, and ultimately sell recyclable materials. It turns out that they also have a plastic bag problem.
We had a problem worth solving. But how?
Solution Development
We began by understanding what made it so hard to recycle these bags in the first place.
Plastic bags are one of the biggest safety and productivity disrupters for MRFs, and when present, they devalue the waste streams that MRFs market. When they enter sorting equipment, bags can cause jams that shut down entire lines for manual repair. Fixing these jams is dangerous work and contributes to the industry’s difficult safety record, where injuries are almost three times more likely than the national average.
The problem boiled down to two Cs: convenience and contamination. If we could make recycling plastic bags more convenient for recyclers and address the issue of contamination for the MRFs, we’d be able to create value for both groups.
After reflecting on our own willingness to go out of the way for specialty drop-offs or return programs, we knew an effective solution needed to be compatible with curbside pickup—the way 72 million, or 60%, of American households recycle.
Ironically, we needed to make it easy to add a contaminant back to the waste stream, but even easier to ultimately remove. EcoPods would do just that.
EcoPods are a proposed fully-recycled and fully-recyclable way to collect plastic bags and films for curbside recycling. By stuffing the container full of otherwise landfill-bound plastic, curbside recyclers can easily and responsibly dispose of these pesky materials. When the container is full, it goes into the recycling bin like any old bottle. No longer prone to jamming the line, these plastics could be automatically sorted and processed.
A prototype easy enough for even the littlest recyclers.
Go To Market
To validate our hypothesized solution, we decided to examine the test market of Toronto, Canada. We estimated the avoided costs of shutdowns and injuries plus the increased value of the waste stream would be worth between $15 and 25 million. MRFs could begin accepting EcoPods without operational changes or new equipment, making barriers to adoption low.
John’s engineering experience was critical in designing and pricing an injection-molded protoype. For just a few pennies per unit, we had a solution to a problem nagging at millions of people.
At a selling price of under $2 for a 10-pack, costs for adopters would average just $4 per year for a household disposing a typical number of bags. With initial adoption of 1.5% in the Toronto market, the business plan modeled a positive NPV and rapid return on investment.
Lessons Learned
That was as far as we took the idea through the course of the project, but we all came away with a deeper knowledge in bringing a viable solution to market.
By combining solid customer research with concentration on desirability, feasibility, and viability, we were able to quickly ideate a novel, if hypothetical, solution to a very real problem.
As the course came to a close, I found myself disappointed that we would only be able to go as far as the hypothetical.
But I’m currently applying to design thinking programs to deepen my skillset, and would love to continue working on this project. With access to the right tools, I’d hope to build an initial prototype and see how this idea translates to the physical world.