Recimovil

• MISSION - Design a solution that addresses the systemic mobility challenge that the informal waste picking community in Medellín, Colombia, faces in their strife toward gaining legitimacy in the eyes of the public

• TIMEFRAME - Five weeks in Spring 2019

• CONTEXT - Harvard University Master in Design Engineering program core studio 2 assignment 02

• TEAM - Daniela Teran, David Gomez-Gil, Hanif Wicaksono, and Oliver Luo

Recimovil is a system and service platform designed to help waste pickers in Medellín, Colombia, become legitimate service providers in the eyes of the citizens. The platform includes digital and physical elements, both aiming to improve the general image of waste pickers and create a direct connection with Medellín inhabitants. The design is developed based on research of success stories of waste pickers around the globe, many of whom have taken steps towards their shared goal of social and economic inclusion. Additionally, we partnered with Arreciclar, a Medellín-based association of waste pickers that gave us direct connection to waste pickers and guided our design decisions through our close collaboration. The Recimovil platform was designed for deployment in three phases. Within the scope of this in-class project, we developed the first phase: the Recimovil Cart, a fundamental first-step toward developing the second and third phases of the project that represented an opportunity to improve the working conditions of waste picking.

STATUS QUO

Waste pickers worldwide constitute an extremely vulnerable community. According to WIEGO, the global network for women in informal employment, in Colombia’s second biggest city Medellín, there are 3,600 waste pickers who on average collect 75 kilos of material per day and earn 12 USD for that amount of material. They are historically made up of economic migrants and people displaced from armed conflict in their home countries. More likely than not, they have low levels of education and few employment alternatives, and they are often not recognized/legitimized in the eyes of either the government or the society at large.

Not everything, however, is bad news. In 2016, a rare policy innovation happened: the Colombian government started recognizing members of waste picker organizations as public service providers by remunerating them for their collection, transport, and sorting services. For the waste pickers, this meant a new source of stable income on top of what they make from selling salvaged recyclables. This outcome, the result of a political struggle of more than two decades, legitimized waste pickers before the government and made them a formal piece of the city’s waste collection system. Getting legitimacy before the inhabitants of Medellín, however, is a different story: the path for waste pickers towards legitimacy in the eyes of the Colombian society is still an ongoing challenge.

RESEARCH

To better understand the problem space and the waste picker journey, we leveraged one of our teammate’s connections to the city of Medellín to partner with a local waste pickers’ association named Arreciclar. The association promotes the participation and advocacy in political and decision-making scenarios in order to improve living conditions, acquire provisions for better services, and build security and dignification of the waste picking profession, and as such, we saw the partnership with them invaluable for primary research, collaborative design, proposal evaluation and potential implementation. As part of our design research, we conducted semi-structured interviews with both decision makers in the organization and individual waste pickers. We also engaged some waste pickers in exploratory and participatory design exercises, in one of which we asked them to draw out what their ideal image of their daily work journey is.

From the stories we gathered, we were surprised that despite there being a desire to become economically self-sufficient and self-determination, many of the waste pickers took great pride in their work, often describing their job as an integral part of Medellín. Since the manual sorting process results in materials that have a much higher chance of being accepted and thus qualifying for compensation, they were aware of the value in the service they were providing for the community - a value that the community did not readily acknowledge.

Especially for the two of us on the team who did not know enough Spanish to engage directly with waste pickers and primary material, we also researched existing waste picking communities and learned about the paths these communities took towards legitimacy in the eyes of different stakeholders. The Global Alliance of Waste Pickers proved to be a great resource, directing us to a range of projects in areas spanning from security and agency to community-building and economic sustainability. We also studied analogous initiatives as precedents to understand how the organizations worked with informal workers and learnings from both success and failure stories.

PROBLEM DEFINITION

From a synthesis of our findings, we gained a clearer picture of the waste collection system in Medellín, where the key stakeholders stand, and how we might intervene. It was evident that we would not be able to address the full scope of the problem within the span of a semester, and we must pick the right battle - from both the perspective of how we might deliver the most impact with the first step of implementing our platform, and from the perspective of what our team wanted to get out of this master’s degree studio project.

We identified three potential causes for the lack of recognition of waste pickers as legitimate service providers in Medellín:

• Lack of visibility - the ability to uniformly and consistently represent their organizations and their needs in front of other stakeholders in the network.

• Lack of voice - the ability to effectively communicate their interests and promote their positions in spaces for dialogue and decision-making.

• Lack of knowledge - the ability to generate and distribute well-founded information about their work to key stakeholders.

SYSTEM DESIGN

From this problem definition, we designed a three-phased Recimovil platform that targets different points in the local waste picking system in Medellín.

In Phase I – Positioning, we focus on providing waste pickers with new carts that renovate their image and improve their working conditions while laying out the groundwork and infrastructure needed to support the roll-out for the rest of the platform.

In Phase II – Connecting, we focus on matching waste pickers with individual households and inhabitants of Medellín through a mobile app. This app will use the data collecting capabilities of the carts and the launch of take-home bins to create and reinforce individual relationships between local waste pickers and households, building a network to streamline the waste collection process.

In Phase III – Expanding, we focus on using the built infrastructure to cement waste pickers as the recognized, go-to providers of municipal waste collection services not only to households but also local partner businesses. We also work with the Arreciclar leadership team to leverage data captured from the Recimovil platform to facilitate operation and strengthen bargaining power before other stakeholders in the system.

CART PROTOTYPE

We validated the platform with our partner and decided, given the constraint of our assignment, to build out only the first phase for our class presentation.

To redesign the waste picking cart, we examined the current cart and mapped out the day-in-the-life-of waste pickers. The journey map offered us insights into several key moments - such as maneuvering on hilly slopes, sharing the road with motorists, and sorting the collected material shortly before turning in - where pain points emerge. From these pain points as well as being mindful of designing into the system the capacity for successful implementation of phases two and three of platform, we derived a set of values for us to guide us as we iterated on the cart redesign.

Part of the challenge of the cart redesign, besides mechanical engineering and ergonomics, was the economic feasibility. We were keen on keeping the cost down by designing within the local circular economy, recycling used bike parts and adopting components from existing carts. But the time constraint of the assignment demanded us to prototype using materials to which we had immediate access and which we had the skills to manipulate. So as part of the cart ecosystem, we considered potential funding schemes, such as grants from local partner businesses and municipalities, shared ownership model, or leasing through the Arreciclar organization.

Many thanks to Sawako Kaijima, Jock Herron, Julia Lee, Ariana Mazzeo, Peter Stark, Vivek HV, Saif Haobsh, Maddie Hickman, Steve Cortesa, the Arreciclar Association (Paula Cordoba, Adriana Londono, and waste pickers in interviews and participatory design exercises), David Gomez-Gil, Daniela Teran, Hanif Wicaksono, and all of MDE '20.