A field research on residential solid waste management in Beijing

As the biggest municipal solid waste generator all over the world, China has been facing unprecedented waste crisis since last decade (WorldBank, 2005). Especially in urban areas, rapid growing waste amount has led to pressing problems in environmental, economical and social aspects to municipal government and residents. Under this circumstance, Bei- jing, as the second biggest city in China, has adopted multiple approaches and allocated enormous resources to improve local waste management system for dealing with the ex- panding municipal solid waste stream (Wen, 2013; Liu, 2014). As proved by global practices, public involvement is vital for solving waste crisis in gen- eral. Therefore, Beijing municipality has initiated waste segregation pilot program since 2003 as a measure aiming to involve resident participation in household waste segregation. After being implemented more than ten years, the program has been proved unsuccessful cause residents’ compliance with waste sortation in pilot community is still low (FON, 2013). The study is triggered by the unsatisfactory result of pilot program. It is a personal initiative to explore what designer can contribute to this critical social problem in context of China. Since residents are main generators and ideal source sortation practitioners of household waste, creating deeper understanding on their behaviors and incentives in terms of waste segregation is crucial. Designers have been given practical tool-kit for exploring in the sphere of acquiring empathy and understanding on humans. Therefore, in my study, field research strategy and different human centered approaches such as semi-structured inter- view, contextual inquiry etc. has been employed. By entering the real settings where people live and work everyday, their behaviors and living contexts regarding to waste handling have been closely examined and connected. The research findings have revealed in-depth internal and external causes, which lead to resident low conformity with waste sortation in local. Patterns of relation between their be- haviors and respective contexts are illustrated in form of personas. A list of briefly pre- sented ideas is given as well for offering possibilities of improvement which could be con- sidered and conducted in the future by different stakeholders. In the end deliverable is given as a communication campaign for enhancing public aware- ness and participation in household waste sortation. The campaign includes online medium as a website and offline tool as poster. Info-graphic about waste crisis and a card game for introducing sortation rule are designed as major contents of the campaign. The deliverable is not a final solution, but an open-ended prototype which will be further tested and devel- oped together with residents and other stakeholders in the future