Imagining a Zero Waste Future in Wexford
Funded by the Main Street Innovation Fund, this project aimed to 1. Better understand the Scarborough and specifically Wexford community 2. To learn more about their relationship to waste and 3. To brainstorm zero waste solutions that might work for members of the community given their specific lived experiences and locations.
Prior to the workshop, business owners at two nearby plaza restaurants; Sahan and Ghadir were interviewed to better understand their businesses, their thoughts about single use and reusable food packaging and who their customers were. We learned that business owners were passionate about serving their communities but had mixed feelings about reusable food containers. One owner preferred customers to dine-in so he could provide the hospitality customary to his culture. The other owner used disposables for both dine-in and take out customers. Both expressed concerns about washing reusable packaging citing the additional costs and labour to do this and the price sensitivity of their customer base. They were also concerned about accepting take-away containers brought by customers due to sanitary concerns, in particular due to their experiences during the pandemic.
Based on these interviews, personas, or characters meant to represent generalized customer types, were developed. These were kept purposefully vague with the intention of having workshop participants validate them and add details based on their own lived experiences.We asked participants to tell us stories about how the personas met, what each of them enjoy, what they do during the day, where they live, what makes them happy, what’s most important to them and what they hope for.
While many of the ideas generated in the workshop were not new, valuable insights were surfaced about participants’ willingness or unwillingness to participate in certain behaviours and/or programs given the reality of their daily lives. Much of the brainstorming around solutions was targeted towards city, provincial and federal policy makers, with the recognition that individuals and small businesses would require additional supports and incentives. At the same time, there was also the recognition that relying on political change takes time; time that we don’t necessarily have in the face of accelerating climate crises.
Follow on work from this project could involve sharing findings with business owners to understand their willingness to participate in the solutions suggested as well as further co-designing and piloting a selection of the local interventions suggested, for example a social media campaign or a free library of reusable containers in the plaza. Success metrics could be solicited from the community and business owners and outcomes tracked to understand impact.
