Research & Ideation
How to improve waste management in Vietnam
Overview
Time: Dec, 2021 - present
Team: 2 people
Role: Research & Ideation
Challenge
Waste sorting and management is a big issue in Vietnam that causes environmental pollution with current landfill dumping for all types of waste.
Goal
We, as two young Vietnamese citizens, want to understand the current problem and ideate solutions to improve the waste management system and accelerate changes in Vietnamese behaviors about this issue.
Research
How we did
Desk study
Interviewed 5 young citizens about waste sorting situations in their houses
Since most participants are foreigners, they face language barriers when searching for needed information
Outcomes
Get a clear and overview picture of the household waste journey
Understand the reasons for the lack of waste sorting in household
Generate insights on current solutions from private organizations as well as from governments
Household waste journey in Vietnam
Current problems & challenges
We focused on citizens, governments, and urban environment companies when identifying their challenges and pain points in the whole waste management system.
Current/ planned solutions
From governments
At least 5 waste-to-energy plants across big cities have been in construction states, which shows the governments’ commitments to moving from landfill dumping to better methods of waste treatment. However, their progress has been very slowed and behind schedule.
From 01.01.2022, new legislation was enforced to encourage people to sort waste into 3 main types. Instructions on how to follow have not been communicated broadly and clearly to citizens.
From private collectors
With slow progress from the governments, individuals started to act and expand the market for waste recycling. There is an increase in formal private collectors that provides incentives (gifts, vouchers,..) for citizens to sort out and trade recyclable wastes.
However, without strict legislation and government funding, waste sorting is still considered a nice to have from all perspectives. Besides, according to mGreen, a private collector, they face a big challenge of operation cost when scaling up their business model for even one apartment building.
Personas
We created 2 personas from based on the data gathered from the interviews to identify major goals and frustrations in citizens’ perspectives
Ideation
Problem statements & Ideas
With governments enforcing the legislation, one of the main factors to make waste sorting work is citizens’ behaviors and how to ensure they follow the legislation accurately. We ideated what we can do to accelerate the waste sorting rate at households using how-might-we methods and focused on 2 personas that we understood the most through research phase.
Optimizing the waste management process
We categorized our ideas into 4 categories based on the waste management process to evaluate which ideas are feasible for us to execute.
Building a community
Our objectives
We drafted out a short-term plan as a guide for our growth and directions within the next 6 months
Half-year plant
We categorized our ideas into 4 categories based on the waste management process to evaluate which ideas are feasible for us to execute.
Phase 1 | Jan - Mar, 2022
Goal: Influence young people to make the change: first topic - waste sorting
Methods:
Use art & design to communicate climate stories
Organize engaging online challenges to encourage waste sorting
Collaborate with influencers to reach more audiences
Open discussion and sharing of knowledge and experience
Phase 2 | Mar - Jun, 2022
Goal: Influence older generations to make the change: first topic - waste sorting
Methods:
Use facts and inspiring stories from different countries
Collaborate with YouTubers with similar target audiences to create content about environmental issues: waste-sorting first
Collaborate with governments once our community becomes stronger and bigger to reach wider audiences and create more formal content
Platforms
We picked Instagram as the first platform to build our community. Because it is a popular SoMe platform among youngsters in Vietnam. Besides, image and video content can be easily created and digested on Instagram.
E.g: Instagram posts from @sorted.community
YouTube
From the research phase, we learned from the 2 personas that the Head of household and the Aware youngster's mother are easily influenced by YouTube with content about family, and lives in different countries. Thus, we decide the platform to target older audiences is YouTube.
What I have learned
The main thing I have learned during the research phase is realizing how big this project is when we started and how to scope it down and chop it into smaller steps, to avoid being overwhelming and powerless.
There are of course many things still missing in the projects:
All stakeholders’ perspectives and their challenges, we didn’t have many contact points to get the whole picture
Vietnamese content: Our intention is to use both languages: English and Vietnamese to communicate on the platforms. As we want to both reach Vietnamese people and also can engage people around the world in discussions