Increasing recycling with Material Focus
by Rick Payne, PhD student at The University of Portsmouth and Nicole Holgate, Communications Manager at DataKind UK
The volunteers and staff at Material Focus's DataDive weekend
“Behaviour change is about motivation and ease. If we made it easier, what would have the biggest impact?”
Scott Butler
Executive Director, Material Focus
Hear DataKind UK volunteers Melissa Co and Tiffany Wang talk about the Material Focus project at the Data Science Festival Mayday 2024
“Recycle your electricals, recycle your electricals; don’t bin your electricals, recycle your electricals!” So says HypnoCat in an advert encouraging people to recycle anything electrical. Our planet has a finite resource of rare materials that underlie our everyday lives — the expensive metals that make up your phone, its chargers and cables, and even the tiny wires in vapes.
Rather than mine for this shrinking resource, an effective way to tackle manufacturers’ need for these materials is recycling. Your junk drawer is a potential gold mine, and one of the best ways to use this value is to get the raw parts back into circulation, transformed into something new. Recycling these materials can have a huge environmental impact — and it’s certainly better than letting them gather dust at home. But, do you know where and how to recycle all of your old phone chargers? This is where Material Focus comes in.
Material Focus is an independent not-for-profit organisation that aims to increase electrical recycling through partnerships that will increase the number and type of recycling collection points, whether with large shops or local authorities; and by inspiring people to recycle through raising awareness and generating insights that help overcome barriers to recycling.
As Executive Director Scott Butler explained, “Behaviour change is about motivation and ease — if it’s too difficult for people to do it, we won’t be able to get them to do it. If we made it easier, what would have the biggest impact?”
From air fryers to hair dryers, via vapes and LED-decorated bottles, electrical waste is a growing issue. How can data science help to solve that?
What data challenges did Material Focus have?
Material Focus has a wealth of ideas on how to make a greater impact, but the team wants to get a better idea of where to focus their efforts. They also need to gather evidence to show their stakeholders what would make a difference and grow the number of electrical items people recycle. Material Focus felt their data could help them answer several important questions, such as where in the UK they could achieve the greatest impact if small electricals were recycled by major supermarkets. They also want to understand whether factors like proximity to a collection point influence the amount of electrical goods that are recycled in an area. They can then encourage local authorities to fund more collection points. With an upcoming consultation on government legislation around waste electricals, evidence based on data could make an invaluable contribution to this process.
How did Material Focus collaborate with DataKind UK?
Material Focus worked with DataKind UK and a team of volunteers to collate existing data on recycling rates for electronic goods and general recycling, the location of recycling points, and people’s travel times to get to one. They combined this with publicly available data on population density, car ownership, type of home, and other relevant variables.
Cleaning, combining, and presenting this data to answer these questions is challenging. However, meeting the challenge is a lot easier when you have access to 30 data experts working together at a DataDive weekend. Especially when they are supported by Data Ambassadors, who worked with Material Focus over several weeks to clarify the questions they wanted to be answered and ensure the data was ready to analyse.
A visualisation of average travel time in minutes to any recycling location for people living in the area, moving from a maximum of 20 minutes to under six minutes. The large amount of dark areas across England shows that a huge proportion of people have less than 12 minutes travel to a recycling point.
What did they find?
Initial analysis identifying the best and the worst local authorities for recycling will be very powerful, helping Material Focus to find out why, spread best practices, and help poor performers do better. It was great to see that one of Material Focus’s earliest projects had helped a local authority come out on top — the graph shows that a funded electronic vehicle on the Isles of Scilly has put them streets ahead of the next top recycler. Scott added “We did that! We are seeing some areas that we’ve helped… We can also see what areas really need help.”
Material Focus is also really concerned with what will influence more individuals to recycle — not just help people who would have been recycling anyway. Volunteers looked at how far people had to travel to recycle, how densely populated areas were compared to how many people recycled, and even whether they could get their recycling collected from the kerbside. All of these interlinking analyses gave Material Focus a picture of what might make the most significant impact on people’s recycling behaviour. Scott commented, “It’s interesting to have this evidence and data for things we’ve spoken about before.”
What was the DataDive weekend experience like?
This was DataKind UK’s new CEO Kye Lockwood’s first DataDive weekend experience. He said “It was beautiful to see these data scientists working together — learning from each other, eager to see what others had achieved and generating so many ideas. The energy, passion, and commitment was amazing.”
From the buzz in the room, it was clear the data scientists and everyone there in support had a fantastic experience — making new friends, finding out about new data science tools and techniques, and applying their data expertise to a significant sustainability issue.
Weekend volunteer Lakshmi commented: “So much joy and purpose in the space! Learning about an industry I’ve never personally worked in, playing around with the dataset, brushing up on skills I’ve not used in a while — I felt like I was back in school this weekend and I absolutely loved it!”
What’s next?
Material Focus hopes to use the findings as an influencing tool to discuss how local authorities can improve their performance and how big national retailers can have an impact by adding more collection points. They also have a better idea of what to communicate in their campaigns and where to direct some of their funding. Finally, they’re building up a great idea of what data is most useful to them, especially from other sources they hadn’t previously looked at.
Executive Director Scott really valued the experience and the insights he gained. He even gave up watching his beloved Bolton Wanderers win at Wembley. “The DataDive weekend was a great experience. It was amazing to work with so many talented people who gave up their weekend to support our work!”
Thanks so much to our DataDive weekend hosts and sponsors Carwow, our weekend volunteers, the Material Focus team Scott Butler and Alice Brady, and especially the brilliant Data Ambassadors Melissa Torgbi, Sam Blake, Patrick Savoie, and Justin Boylan-Toomey.
