Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Rusha Latif

Designing Plastic Waste out of the Economy

On July 22, 2017, our OpenIDEO Palo Alto team had the pleasure of hosting 35 passionate innovators at the SAP AppHaus for our first chapter event, an energetic 5-hour Ideation Jam to explore solutions to one of the world’s most challenging problems: the abundance of plastic waste. Growing out of the Circular Design Challenge, our event was part of a global OpenIDEO community effort to understand the principles of the circular economy and apply them towards our broken plastics system. This concerted effort involved researching, brainstorming, and prototyping potential ways to achieve the future we want — one in which plastic doesn’t become waste.

The Challenge focused on small-format plastics — those pesky, difficult-to-recycle items like sauce and shampoos sachets, wrappers and tear-offs, takeaway coffee cup and lids, and straws and bottle caps that make up 10% of all plastic packaging items. These items rarely get recycled because their small size and light weight makes them difficult to capture during the filtering process. As a result, they often end up in the environment, wreaking havoc as they accumulate in landfills and oceans across the world.

GreenWaste is working to help the city of Palo Alto become zero-waste by 2022.

Our task as designers was to come up with ways to deliver products to people without generating small plastic packaging waste. In order to do this, we needed to develop a deeper understanding of the problem and build empathy with the people who use these types of packaging to make sure our solutions still fit into their lives. We invited Andrew Sheldon, a zero-waste expert from GreenWaste of Palo Alto to provide a local perspective on the challenges of recovering small plastics. GreenWaste is the service provider responsible for extracting recyclables and compostables from the waste stream, and Andrew shared insights from his many years of experience. Also at our disposal was the extensive research OpenIDEO community members had collected and shared on the platform consisting of personas, themes, and opportunity areas. We had the teams dive into this material and led them through robust conversations to help inspire them and ensure their designs were rooted in empathy.

Inspired by these learnings, our teams imagined new product packages, delivery models, services, consumer incentives, and systems to shift consumer behavior away from plastic consumption and waste. They then built prototypes to test and further refine their ideas and shared them with the larger group for feedback. Check out some of the awesome work from our event:

Some participants built on their learnings and continued to come up with more ideas after the event. These ideas included:

Material Flow: A map of all materials in the recycling/composting/landfill ecosystem currently available to help product designers design
ECO-GO!: A mobile app and game that encourages reuse packaging and recycling
Bottle Tap: A circular service concept allows users to freely (and cheaply) buy, drink, and enjoy their favorite beverages using reusable bottles
Cap Trap: A device that saves caps and the environment at the same time

We’re happy to share that two groups had their ideas selected out of the 600+ generated by the global OpenIDEO community to advance to the refinement stage of the challenge. During this phase, they’ll have the amazing opportunity to work with a global network of advisors and community prototypers to further develop their concept. A special congrats to the chapter members behind the following shortlisted ideas!

Smart Vending Machines: An ecosystem of vending machines that provide portioned servings of food and drinks using compostable or reusable containers (conceived at the Ideation Jam)
Ori-Cup: a one-piece, flat-ship, fold-up, straw-and-lid-integrated, hot/cold beverage cup, inspired by origami (conceived independently)

Ideation Jam participants sharing their Smart Vending Machine idea, which made it through to the refinement phase of the challenge

We’re excited about these ideas and the 101 others from OpenIDEOrs around the world that made it to the next round, all of which will be competing for prizes ranging from $10,000-$200,00 for idea implementation each. Together, they have the potential to transform the plastics ecosystem and help us make significant strides towards a more environmentally sustainable future.

This kickoff event was just the beginning! If you’re interested in learning more about circular design and getting involved in this challenge, it’s not too late. You can help shortlisted teams improve their ideas by offering them feedback on the site. Some are even welcoming new team members. We’ll also be hosting a follow-up meetup the week of August 21st (details TBA) featuring experts in the circular design and sustainability space to help our Palo Alto teams refine their ideas, in addition to more events around future challenges. Join our OpenIDEO Palo Alto Chapter and follow our Meetup Group for details. We welcome new members!

Throwing up O signs for OpenIDEO! 🙂

Thinking Circularly was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Thinking Circularly

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