A new poster from the School of Continuous Improvement audits ten kitchenette compost bins before and after a lid recolour, finding contamination unchanged and Facilities' new lids kept regardless.
A twelve-week bin-by-bin count finds contamination unchanged after Facilities recoloured kitchenette compost-lids, though the lids stayed anyway
Ten kitchenettes, twelve weeks, and one change of bin-lid colour were enough to give the School of Continuous Improvement its cleanest null result of the year.
Facilities recoloured the compost-bin lids across the University’s shared kitchenettes in March, after complaints that the old colour was too easily mistaken for the general-waste stream. Dr Mirela Hanke and Dr Bram Ntuli hand-sorted six weeks of bin contents either side of the change, coding every item against the University’s compost-eligibility list. Contamination held in the high teens to low twenties throughout, in every kitchenette, whichever lid was on.
A lid can only tell you what a bin used to be called. What goes in it is a habit, and habits don’t read signage.
— Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Continuous Improvement
“We didn’t expect Facilities to keep the new lids regardless,” said Dr Bram Ntuli, a co-author, “but a print run, once ordered, turns out to be its own kind of finding.”
The University points to the result as exactly the kind of finding its evaluation-ecosystem agenda exists to surface — not a failure of the scheme, but a more honest account of what it did and didn’t do. The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.hnclxr.