Workshop 3: what to do with the compost

A massive part of the plan for the Maiden Lane Food Loop has always been to get more food and flowers growing on the estate, so that residents can see that the compost produced from their food waste is being put to good use.

We ran a workshop yesterday to see what residents would like to grow on the estate, and where. We have talked to Camden Council’s housing department, and have identified 5 areas that could be used for food growing on the estate. So we started off the workshop with a tour round the estate, to see what ideas people had for a greener Maiden Lane.

We talked about various ways in which people could grow food – using their balconies; putting large grow bags on paved areas; using existing greenspace and hanging baskets; even putting allotments on top of the community centre! We had some really fantastic input and ideas from residents.

Next up, we asked people to imagine what Maiden Lane could be like in 5 years, and to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. Rachel and Matthias from Studio Loop.ph provided us with some ‘fortune cookies’ that gave residents a new identity, an area to work with and tracing paper and pictures to get creative.

The session they ran was great, and we’ll be running another workshop in the next few months to decide exactly what we’ll be growing and where. In the meantime, residents were given some bulbs and seedlings to told to get planting!

Sorry you weren’t in…

We’ve redesigned ELCRP’s standard ‘Sorry you were out…‘ leaflet, and have made one specfically for Maiden Lane. It includes lots of the nice things that people said about the scheme at our recent workshop!

Workshop two: room for improvement?

We were back at the Maiden Lane Community Centre on Sunday for our second workshop. The food waste recycling scheme has been running for two months, and we were keen to hear what people had to say – what has been going right, what has been going wrong, and what they thought of the rocket!

It was nice to hear that everyone had been pleased with the leaflet produced from their work in the last workshop. The residents also had several useful suggestions about how we can improve the food waste scheme, including:

• Set up some way of showing when people want more bin liners or Bokashi powder
• Remind people to put their bins out, perhaps by sending a text reminder to people on Sunday night
• Make sure bin bags and Bokashi powder don’t get left in wet bins – post them through the letterbox instead
• Get bigger bins for larger families, or some kind of central drop off point somewhere on the estate

We’ll be incorporating these comments  into the service blueprint that we drew up on Thursday, and will use our new and improved blueprint to try and improve the service.

As always, our thanks go to all the wonderful residents who made the workshop such a success. Now to try and put some of those ideas in to practice…

Blueprints. Like sausages…

We spent the afternoon at the Maiden Lane Community Centre this week, working with our service designer Sean to put together a ‘service blueprint’ for the food waste collection scheme.

Blueprinting is a design process that is used to map the ways in which a customer uses a service. In the case of our project, the process meant identifying all of the points at which a resident would interact with the food waste collection scheme. Blueprinting is also a process that Sean likened to making sausages: the final product is great but the process can be very messy.

What really made the afternoon such a success was the attendance of Sheila, who works for ELCRP and manages the Rocket composter on Maiden Lane. Having Sheila there made we learnt a lot about ELCRP’s current service model and were able to discuss with her ways of improving the scheme.

For example, at the moment there is a problem with feedback – if residents want to communicate with ELCRP, for example to request a new bag, they have to leave a note stuck to their caddy. We think this could be made easier for all involved, something we’ll be discussing with residents at our next workshop very soon.

In the shadows

We spent some time this week shadowing ELCRP, during their second round of door-knocking on the estate.

The reason for ELCRP doing this again was two-fold. Partly, it was to deliver bins to the residents on the estate who haven’t yet been given them. It was also to knock on the doors of people that do have bins but who ELCRP know have not been using them each week. ELCRP used the door-to-door contact with residents as an opportunity to identify any problems with the scheme and to make sure everyone knew how to use their caddies.

It was this last bit that we were interested in. We wanted to hear what reasons people gave for not using their bins and to listen out for any problems they might have encountered.

Watching ELCRP in action was really useful for us, in a number of ways. For a start, it highlighted that what people say and what people do are often very different things. For example, lots of people simply said that they had put their bin out, even though we knew from our participation data that this was not the case.

We also realised some of the things that we could have made clearer on our leaflet. Some people did not realise that their bin needed to be outside their door by 8am on a Monday, others had been forgetting to put the bin out.

Finally, it made it clear that ELCRP’s routine of only door-knocking between 10am and 4pm means that they miss a lot of people. We’ll be discussing this with them and Camden Council to see what more can be done to access those that work during the day.

Tribulations & participation

As we have been learning for a while now, one of the biggest challenges of action research is the way that things often don’t go as planned. In fact, they can go quite badly.

At the moment, Maiden Lane’s food waste scheme has a problem and, if you are one of the residents living above the site where the Rocket has been installed, you will know all to well how bad that problem smells.

Despite assurances that the Rocket would be odourless, several residents living close to the composting machine are being affected by very bad composting smells. The Council is working hard to sort this out and is looking at installing a deodorising system.

Unfortunately, there is very little that we, the research team, can do about this although we are making sure that the Council keep residents fully informed of developments. For us, it is vital that the residents affected by the smell are told exactly what’s going on.

On a much brighter notes, we have received some initial data on participation rates. So far, over 50% of households on the estate have been given caddies and, of these, 170 households put out food waste to be collected during the collections’ first two weeks of  operation.

This means that almost 64% of households that have bins are taking part of the scheme. Not bad… but could do better! We’ll be considering how we can improve this participation rate during our next research workshop.

The launch! We have take off…

On Sunday 20th September, after months of planning, Maiden Lane’s new food waste collection scheme was officially launched. The launch event took place on the estate and gave residents a chance to have a tour of the Rocket. There was tasty barbecued food up for grabs (and caddies for the food waste of course), as well as live music and a stall giving out winter salad leaves for residents to plant. Several of our design team were also there.

We used the launch as an opportunity to speak to residents about how they felt about food waste, using a short questionnaire. Everyone that we spoke to was entered into a prize draw, for a meal for two at Acorn House - one of London’s nicest eco-restaurants. The questionnaires allowed us to speak to people about food waste and the leaflets that we designed with residents.

We also gave out lots of FoodLoop helium balloons, which led to lots of children with squeaky voices…

Look what’s just arrived…

After months of planning, the Rocket composter was finally delivered yesterday. It’s now busy warming up, ready for it’s first load of Maiden Lane food waste on Monday 21st September.

The final leaflet

Based on the all of the input from residents, and with feedback from Camden Council and ELCRP, we have designed a final leaflet to explain to residents how to use the new food waste scheme. Hoorah!

It will be delivered to every resident on the estate with their food waste caddy, starting on the 21st of September.

You can see the cover, leaflet and A5 leaflet insert here:

Testing the prototypes

As part of our leaflet design process, the resident design team got to trial four different ‘prototype’ leaflets. These were based on all of the comments and feedback received at the workshop. Here are the four leaflets:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And here’s how well they worked: