A project about incentivizing people to recycle inorganic waste in NYC’s subway system as a part of New York University’s IDM program.

The project’s time frame was 5 weeks (November 12-December 10, 2019) and in collaboration with Sai Liu.

Based on my observation at Jay Street Metrotech Station, there are highly noticeable trash around the subway rails, especially around the R Train halls.

• Subway riders are increasing, while the maintenance are dipping and time delays are getting worse.
• Plastic waste if burn could emit dangerous chemicals which could cause respiratory ailments and stress human immune systems.
• Temperature on the stations can overheat which could cause technical problems in the railways.

Goal

To incentivize people to reduce waste around the station by recycling inorganic waste in exchange of MTA credits as an extrinsic motivation.

Solution

Create a reverse recycling vending machine that exchanges plastic waste into MTA credits.

We created a stakeholder map which illustrates how the stakeholders interact with the system.

Survey

Questions:

• “Do you recycle and why?”
• “Have you ever seen or used a reverse vending machine in New York? If yes, give example of where you see one”
• “In your own words, why do people litter in subway stations?”
• “If reverse vending machines exist in subway stations, would you be interested in exchanging waste for MTA credits? (Yes/No/Maybe)”
• “Do you think people would recycle their waste if reverse vending machines exist in subway stations? Explain why.”

To see what respondents think about what other people would behave if people are extrinsically more motivated to recycle when they get MTA credits in exchange.

User Interviews

We got 7 answers from anonymous New Yorkers, here is the summary:

• All of the respondents recycle and some of them try their best to recycle because they want to save the environment as well.
• One respondent mentioned the lack of garbage cans in the subway stations. People are lazy and there is no social contract to keep the stations clean.
• 5 people have never seen one in New York. 2 people have seen them in supermarket near their homes. This means that these reverse vending machines are not easily accessible to New Yorkers in general.
• Respondents are mainly interested to use the facility. Some of them might be interested to try the facility.

Sims Municipal Recycling Interview

We reached out to Sims Municipal Recycling to ask them some questions about the recycling process in New York & we made a diagram of it.

Iteration 1

• This is our first design just to test if people could be incentivized with a reward of a free one-way ride.
• Using 2 Research Mehods: Over-the-shoulder Obervation & Wizard of Oz
• Since we couldn’t find any foldable tables at the time, we only used a bag to put the recycled items accompanied with a small sign

Findings

1. Not many people carried things to be recycled
2. Not many people paid attention to the “recycle area”, they seems very busy during lunchtime (11 AM)
3. A person put the garbage into the trash can instead of the “recycle area”
4. 2 people stopped by and exchanged their plastic bottles with the
5. One said the government should clean the subway station first so that more people will know the place is not allowed to throw trash.
6. One mentioned in their country (Germany), they have recycle systems for bottles and cans. You can exchange money with bottles from vending machines.

Reasons

1. We didn’t have real recycle machines to attract people, the bag doesn’t look convincing enough.
2. We don’t have table and a nice poster to attract people and make us looks formal
3. People were too busy to pay attention to the “recycle area” during lunch time (11:00 PM)

We decided to pick another approach which looks more like the vending machine for next week.

Iteration 2

Before we start building the mock vending machine, we decided to create the user interaction using hand-drawn interfaces on the iPad and we used a box of cookies as the trash can to simulate how the machine would work.

User Interactions

1. Press the Start button

2. Insert MTA Card to the slot

3. Put the bottles into the machine to gain credits. When finished, press the Finish button

4. Remove MTA Card from the slot

5. Finish screen, then automatically goes back to the main screen

Findings

Based on 6 people user testing in class, we determined that:

• They bring plastic bottle, coffee cups, food containers everyday
• They are interested to use this facility
• They want more clear information about gained credits and the economic value of recycled trash
• They want to know the impact of their behavior rather than telling them how much credits they’ve got (e.g. the interface can show how many trees they save by recycling bottles)
• More people like the idea of putting the MTA Card to start the machine because they don’t want to waste time in pressing the start button in the homepage.

Iteration 3

• We built the mock vending machine using recycled cardboard boxes and an iPad for the user interface display.
• We also redesigned the user interface in and designed it on Sketch.
• To save more time, we removed the button to start and instead users can simply put the Metro card to activate the machine.
• We added how much energy is saved by recycling a plastic bottle.

User Interactions

1. Insert MTA Card to start

2. Place bottles into the machine

3. When finished, press the Finish button

4. Receive MTA Card with updated credits

Testing

Findings

We did a 45 minute on-site research in Jay Street Metrotech Station from around 12:00 PM 1o 12:45 PM.

• 8 people stopped by and interacted with the system. They fully interacted with it from entering the MTA Card until placing the recyclable trash in the vending machine.
• People brought water bottles, plastic cups, and food containers.
• Most of the testers noticed the message at the end and they said they learned how much they saved energy.

Iteration 4

To finalize, we recreated the mock vending machine using a bigger starting cardboard box, as well as including a 3D render of the prototype.

• We have tested the prototypes and the system appears to be able to incentivize people to recycle waste to be exchanged into MTA credits, even though more testing sessions are required before the facility is built
• The research was difficult to perform because we had to monitor how people interact with the system while being present in the station with a good prototype that can convince people that the system exists in the station
• We learned how New York City recycles their waste
• The system works great in theory, but money politics and reality seems to be not in the project’s favor. Sims never collaborated with MTA before because MTA has their own waste carter but they don’t process recycled waste like Sims do. A good collaboration must be established between MTA & Sims beforehand