Supporting Citizens for waste management
Issy-les-Moulineaux is a City in the outskirts of Paris, lying on the left bank of the river Seine. It is one of the 8 municipalities of the urban agglomeration Grand Paris Seine Ouest.
In France and particularly in the Paris area, the waste sorting is managed by urban agglomerations with the support of Cities, but it requests a good participation of citizens and/or building trustees. Actually, various type of waste collections exist and they have different rules to be followed:
- Household waste (not sortable) collection happens various times a week on due days, which differ per district, directly on buildings
- Recyclable waste (plastic, paper, alluminium…) collection happens various times a week on due days which differ per distric, directly on buildings
- Glass waste and Closing collection are not collected at buildings and it has to be brought to particular collection points
- Bulky waste collection happens once a week on due days, which differ per district, directly on buildings
- Electric and electronic waste and toxic ones are collected on due days in particular points of the city (usually on market days)
Moreover, recycling centers are available, but they have particular rules of access which are not always well known by the users.
Additionally, citizens often struggle to know how to sort the waste, also due to improvements that are done time by time that make some goods to become sortable, while they were not previously. Today, 50% of the household waste are not sorted, while they could because of the lack of knowledge of citizens. The objective is to have 75% sorted by 2022 which makes necessary to help citizens to do so.
To this end, Issy created an application, with the support of the local experienced company Wedodata, to create a web application based on open data to help users to sort their waste and to have an easy to use guide.
Challenges encountered:
The process of the application was quite easy due to the type of data, from a technical point of view, is quite simple. At the same time, some important challenges were encountered building this application:
- some collections are available, but not always open to all, which obliged not to include them to avoid confusions in users
- the definition of a list of goods to be associated to a waste collection was highly complicated to be done as various goods may represent an exception and it is challenging to identify all the possible goods
Referring to the second point, it was defined a list that can be easily updated through a simple online list in excel type of format.
Stakeholders:
Issy Média, leading partner
Wedodata, technical and storytelling leader
City of Issy-les-Moulineaux, data provider
Grand Paris Seine Ouest urban agglomeration, data provider
Actions steps:
It was defined an application based on simple principles:
- a quick and easy view to the rules and timing of collections
- easily identify on a map the location of the waste collections not done at buildings
- be able to understand to which collection is associated a particular waste
The application, mobile first compliant, has been created to provide an easy to use menu with:
- the various waste collections associated to a map updated with open data (allowing to geolocate)
- a search bar making possible to search for a waste to identify the right collection
The data used were the open datasets (excel and geojson) of the portals of the City of Issy-les-Moulineaux and the Grand Paris Seine Ouest urban agglomeration.
Lessons learned:
This application allowed to understand how mobile version of these applications is particularly necessary as it is today used on more than 60% of cases via smartphone.
Outcome impact:
The application has really good use, more than 1.200 unique users per month, and it showed a really good feedback from the population.
Based on this experience, more applications will be done to use the existing open data and to make it useful.