Garbage in, insights out: What every city can learn from Durham’s composting prototype
By: Bloomberg Cities
Tags: Innovation, Prototyping, Human Centered Design, Cities, Composting

Tenita Poole had never separated her kitchen food waste for composting before. But when the innovation team in Durham, N.C., where she lives, approached her about trying it out for two weeks as part of a prototype, she was eager to give composting a try.

Poole’s family of nine does a lot of cooking with fresh greens, and there’s always a lot of table scraps that go into the trash. “I thought composting would be a wonderful idea,” she said. “I hate to waste food, and composting is really good for not wasting food.”

The children picked the practice up quickly, Poole said, scraping their plates into bags that filled quickly with bits of green beans and corn cobs, along with other compostable items like tissues and cardboard toilet paper rolls. Everyone in the family enjoyed it, Poole said, although the odor of old food in the house became a problem. “My only downside is the smell,” she said. “I had to put it out on the porch.”

Poole’s family is one of eight households that participated in the Durham i-team’s prototype this summer. Their feedback will be critical as the city builds a service it’s never offered before: curbside compost pickup. When all is said and done, the city hopes to divert as much as a third of its waste away from the landfill and then use it to produce a nutrient-rich soil amendment that local farmers, landscapers, and backyard gardeners can use to grow more food.

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Developing a service like this from scratch is a pretty complex endeavor, requiring cooperation from residents, waste collectors, and others. That’s why the Solid Waste Management Department teamed up with the i-team, City Hall’s in-house group of innovation consultants. Funded through a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the i-team is known for using collaborative strategies like prototyping to co-create policies and programs with the very people intended to use them. While Durham’s composting program still has a way to go before it launches, there’s a lot that cities everywhere can learn from the city’s use of these human-centered design techniques.

The effort, a partnership with the Duke University Center for Advanced Hindsight, started with interviewing Durham residents in their homes. Some of those interviewed already compost food waste in their backyards or through a private service, while others have never done it before. Either way, said Shannon Delaney, an i-team design strategist spearheading the compost work, the point was for city leaders to learn how residents deal with their food now — before they build out a whole new set of expectations.

Next came a survey circulated through social media and neighborhood listservs. Nearly 4,500 residents responded, yielding a trove of data about public perceptions and knowledge of composting. The survey not only confirmed an interest among residents in launching a municipal composting service but also began to build a constituency and support network for getting it started.

A resident survey yielded a trove of data about public perceptions and knowledge of composting in Durham.

“We hit a nerve,” said Muriel Williman, Solid Waste’s point person on the composting project. “A good number of people who are not currently composting are interested in learning — and those who already compost are interested in teaching others how to do it. Tapping into that wellspring of interest, desire, and knowledge — all this incredible social capital — is what’s going to make this program fly.”

[Read our explainer on prototyping]

Before they could do that, however, Williman and Delaney needed to see for themselves how Durham residents would respond to separating food waste in their kitchens. So they ran a two-week prototype with just eight households. Unlike a pilot — which would roll out a more complete version of a program — the prototype was intended solely as an experiment to gain feedback and learn from residents. The idea was to tinker in a low-stakes way before investing time and money in building out a more fully functional composting service.

To get started, the i-team reached out to some people who had taken the survey and others who had not, making sure to engage residents who reflect Durham’s racial and ethnic diversity. Every participant was given bags and buckets to put food waste in, along with a guide laying out what other items, like napkins or popsicle sticks, can go in the compost. The i-team used the messaging service WhatsApp to connect with everybody over the two weeks, both to answer any questions and to encourage them to keep photo diaries of their experiences.