Designing for waste segregation
I’m not yet through with the topic of waste management because today I am going to cite an example of how research by our own local designers can potentially help us solve our trash problem.
Last June 1, 19 students from Cebu graduated with a master’s degree in applied art and design at the Shu-Te University in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. I was one of these 19 students of the Master of Arts in Applied Art and Design program, a collaboration between Shu-Te University in Taiwan and the University of the Philippines Cebu.
Ours was the first class (and hopefully not the last) which included 11 public school teachers of the Department of Education Division of Lapu-Lapu City who were scholars of the Lapu-Lapu City government. Classes were held at the UP Cebu SRP campus and its fabrication laboratory at the Gorordo campus. Our professors were from UP Cebu's own College of Communication, Art, and Design and from Shu-Te University who came all the way from Kaohsiung to do their lectures here.
As a requirement for graduation, each student was to submit a thesis and defend it in an oral examination before a thesis panel. One among the many studies of my classmates that caught my interest was that of Debbie Buot-Dabuet entitled “Form Matters: Effect of Trash Bin Redesign to Waste Segregation.”
Scouring related literature and based on her own observation, Buot-Dabuet observed that the design of trash cans which include written labels, signs, and color-coding, seem to be insufficient in bringing about the desired outcome of waste segregation in the country.
She proposed that by using the form of the product and using its shape as a heuristic guide, people will be able to tell which bin to throw their trash – with much less cognitive processing. She manipulated the shape of the trash bins on waste segregation and studied their effect in a four-week field study in different locations of a certain mall in Cebu City.
Buot-Dabuet designed three trash bins: for paper trash, plastic trash, and metal/can trash. For example, by adding certain elements to the shape of the plastic trash bin (e.g. tapered-cylindrical body, flat cover on the top, and a long, thin tube that represents a plastic cup's straw), passers-by were able to recognize the object with a lesser threshold. This, in turn, activated their automatic processing on what other items that belong to the classification they can dispose into the particular trash bin.
However, data on the trash bin for paper waste, which was shaped like the familiar brown paper bag with a zigzag cut on top, suggested that a better shape or form can be used in order achieve the desired effect of increasing segregation among users. As to the trash bin for canned beverages, the researcher observed that empty soda cans were rarely thrown into the shopping mall's trash bins. She posited that canned beverages are also usually sold in restaurants where customers rarely take out their drinks. Thus, she did not make a conclusive assumption with the data available.
In any case, Buot-Dabuet’s study proved that an object like a trash bin can be designed to guide and instruct people to segregate their trash without much cognitive processing on which bin to place their trash. Using the shape of the trash bin as a medium to communicate and inform the user does increase the rate of segregation.
Cebu’s urban problems can be solved if we spend more time looking for solutions based on empirical evidence. People are tired of the politicking and propping up or destroying political egos played up in the mass media.
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