Waste reduction has become crucial and nearly more important than recycling in the recent years by preventing generation of GHGs, introducing green jobs and shifting behaviours (City of Vancouver, 2015). This importance is further highlighted when discussing the ‘Prius Effect’ — a term given to a phenomenon stating that individuals adopt environmentally “sustainable” habits to ennoble themselves (Campbell, 2011).
(Racing to Zero, 2015)
Even so, people may think as long as they recycle their products they are “doing the right thing” (Valley, 2018). Unfortunately, this idea overlooks the importance of reducing waste as one of the first steps to becoming more environmentally sustainable. We hope that we can highlight and address this importance as a team throughout our project. This blog post will go through what our project entails, our weekly objectives and achievements to date. In addition, we will discuss the project’s progression and reflect on our experiences with the project within the context of the course.
In order to address the lack of attention that exists towards waste reduction within the City of Vancouver, we have decided to adopt an asset-based community development (ABCD) approach as discussed by Mathie and Cunnigham in “From clients to citizens: Asset-based Community Development as a strategy for community-driven development” (2003). This encompasses community development work that is not framed through a deficit-based approach, but rather in a way that recognizes and takes advantage of the skills and resources that already exists within a community. Within our project, we hope to use this approach while applying our literary findings to the City of Vancouver. It is important for us to discuss the assets of the community in which we are working in during our meetings with Paul and Ileana in order to take them into consideration while moving forward with our project.
Weekly Objectives & Achievements
Week 1 (January 8) Designated to the ‘Put Waste in its Place’ as our CBEL project
Week 2 (January 15) Met with our group, agreed on our terms of reference and reached out to our community partners, Ileana (CityStudio) and Paul (City of Vancouver)
Week 3 (January 22) Met with Ileana and Paul and discussed project goals, objectives and agreed on a specific timeline
Week 4 (Feb 5) Drafted and submitted our proposal for our community partners and TA Tori to seek feedback. Please refer to our proposal in PDF format at the end of our blog. Conducted in person sticker research of current restaurant stickers.
Week 5 (Feb 12) Received personal feedback from our community partners to approach two restaurant managers about collaborating with the city on our sticker proposal, and adjusted our objectives accordingly. In addition, we scheduled a Skype call as a group to discuss approaches towards the goal of encouraging reusable containers amongst diners.
Week 6 (This Week)
Received feedback from our TA Tori
Began conducting a brief literature review described in the ‘What’ section to discuss with our community partners in addition to HUBBUB poster details.
Week 7 (Next Week – March 5)
Scheduled meeting with our community partners to touch base and discuss our progress/upcoming objectives.
Based on our research analysis and findings, design restaurant sticker prototype(s) that will highlight and promote the importance of the use of reusable take-out containers.
Ongoing Objectives
- Stay in touch with our community partners by providing biweekly updates and check-in via email
- Analyze and connect our research to establish potential reasons as to why individuals may not be motivated to reduce waste.
- Begin sketching out sticker designs and taglines based on our research findings. At the end of the week contact two or three restaurants with our proposed sticker ideas.
- Conclude, finalize our literature review, stickers and prepare for in-class and HUBBUB presentations
(Photos taken by a group member showing a stickered restaurant window, showing DoorDash, Zomato, Yelp and TripAdvisor stickers)
What?
The project objective was initially discussed in our first meeting with our project leaders, Ileana and Paul. We were asked to develop a sustainable way of bringing awareness to reducing the use of take-away container use within the city of Vancouver. The flexibility they gave us for promoting the use of reusable containers attracted our attention. With the support of our community leaders, we collectively decided to work on a sticker prototype to promote reusable containers in place of single-use take-away containers. As a team who share a passion for waste reduction and sustainability, we were driven to begin brainstorming for a potential action plan. However, each of us had a different outlook on how we should approach the project objective. We had different ideas about how to research the barriers and motivators of such sustainable behaviours (conducting public surveys and interviews). As time continued to pass since our initial meeting with Ileana and Paul, we individually tackled our project from different angles. This resulted in divergent approaches that progressed at different paces. Although we appreciate that our project had lots of room for creativity, it also prevented us from reaching a consensus within the timeline that we had planned. It was evident that combining each of our ideas would be unrealistic given our time constraint, and we would become unproductive if we didn’t implement a change in gears and adopt a different strategy. Even so, we still couldn’t decide on a single approach that could aid the design and showcase the significance of a sticker, as well as the role it would play to help fulfill our ambition. This discord in our varying approaches and ideas was also evident in our initial presentation during our in-class tutorial.
So What?
Immediately following our presentation we received feedback to narrow down the scope of what we aimed to achieve from Tori, our tutorial teaching assistant. She advised us that the currently proposed breadth of the project was not executable within our time constraint. It became apparent we needed to narrow down our objectives. Due to our busy schedules, and various locations, it made the most sense to schedule a skype call to achieve this goal. We recognized and valued everyone’s perspectives and input, while keeping in mind the importance of being on the same page for maximum efficiency. As a group, we wrote down each of our ideas and approaches and drew a list of potential pros and cons of each idea/approach. For example, to incentivize customers to bringing reusable containers, we considered looking for restaurants to engage in discounts or rewards for customers who bring their reusable containers. Although a very relevant approach, we removed it as it would have been very difficult to accomplish within our given time constraint. In addition, ideas that required in-person interviews with diners and restaurants were eliminated due to the extra time that would be needed.
After evaluating the benefits and costs of each suggestion, we were able to come to a final agreement on how we were going to approach this project. We decided to focus on the more achievable goal of setting the groundwork for future groups by completing a literature review on the barriers and motivators for using reusable take-out containers, as well as the basis for green advertising and previous initiatives taken by other countries to encourage individual waste reduction.
Now What?
In group projects, it can be difficult to address conflict, resolve situations, and improve team dynamics. After our team Skype call we were able to tackle existing conflicts and find a solution to how we were going to approach our project and goals. It is notable that simple group discussions (like our Skype conference) can be extremely powerful in decision making and project planning. Furthermore, we were able to recognize the importance of respecting each other’s ideas. This allowed us to refer back to the terms of reference that described each member’s strengths to make our project run smoothly.
Since the submission of the project proposal to our community leaders, we have received favourable feedback. One suggestion they made was to revisit our idea of seeing if there would be interest among restaurants to implement our proposal. Ileana and Paul noted that approaching only two or three managers/restaurant owners would be a good sample to add to our paper. While this varied from our original idea of approaching an overarching body to see if they would implement our proposal, it provided a valuable lesson in that narrowing the scope of our objective would allow us to provide better feedback on the real-life application of the project within Vancouver to our community partners, Ileana and Paul.
We have scheduled a second meeting with our community partners on March 5th to update our progress and communicate our final approach. Now that we have adjusted our project tasks based on the feedback from our community partners and TA, we have reached a final agreement on how we were going to approach this project; thus, we can enter our second meeting organized, and present our progress professionally. We are very excited to move forward with this project and see where it takes us!
To see our project proposal click here: Put Waste in its Place: Proposal LFS 350
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References
Alison Mathie & Gord Cunningham (2003). From clients to citizens: Asset based Community Development as a strategy for community-driven development. Development in Practice. 13:5, 474-486, DOI: 10.1080/0961452032000125857
Campbell, C. (2011, April 21). “Conspicuous Conservation” and the Prius Effect. Retrieved February 23, 2018, from http://freakonomics.com
City of Vancouver. (2015). Greenest City: 2020 Action Plan Part Two. Retrieved from The City of Vancouver website: http://vancouver.ca/files/cov/greenest-city-2020-action-plan-2015-2020.pdf
Racing to Zero. (2015). Waste Hierarchy [Online image]. Retrieved from http://trash24.org/three-rs/#sthash.g3eNd8tv.dpbs
Valley, W. (2018). City of Vancouver – Put Waste in its Place: Take-Out Containers. Retrieved from lfs350.landfood.ubc.ca
