I had the privilege of participating on a Coalition of Black Enterprise (CBE) social design thinking panel. Subject matter expert, Mr. George Aye, Co-founder and director of innovation at Greater Good Studio, spearheaded the discussion. While it is promising that corporate America is finally starting to grasp the economic benefits of diversity, there still remains broader work to be done. For instance, it is clear that far too many companies struggle to truly embrace diversity in facets outside of the corporate and social responsibility realm. These efforts should encourage industries to pursue inclusive social designs and community-centered approaches to innovation.

This reminded me of the recent internal efforts in the recycling industry. In particular, the social design efforts being made by Sensible Electronics Recycling International (SERI). SERI has collaborated with Greenlyfocus in implementing a GPS grant program to address improper movements of hazardous e-waste. Seeing this need, one hundred (100) R2 certified recyclers, some with e-Stewards certifications as well, volunteered to participate in the program. They were given the opportunity to use Greenlyfocus’ Green Tracking services to gain more visibility and insights into their downstreams in order to mitigate this issue.

The goal of this community experiment is for processors to become more aware of what is at stake in the recycling industry. To be given space and the tools needed to take ownership of their existing situations has generated a new found trust throughout the chain. This trust, along with quantifiable data in hand, will foster collaboration and information sharing within the industry, their customers, auditors and certification bodies. As the community grows in awareness and mutual respect, each member would become empowered to govern themselves and ultimately weed out bad actors and gain the respect and trust the industry, as a whole, deserves.

This falls in line with good social design methodologies, that in principle, should do the following:

• ● Good social design honors reality
• ● Good social design creates ownership
• ● Good social design builds power

In this three part series, we will explore how the social design methods are being realized in the community created by the SERI grant program.

Honors Reality:

It is no surprise that the recycling industry is facing challenges worldwide in reaching their processing quotas and control of illegal transboundary movements of e-waste. For example, 50 Million Tonnes of e-waste is produced annually and only 20% of e-waste is recycled legally and 80% ends up either in landfills, our homes or being processed illegally in a developing country. Therefore, from the world's perspective, the recycling industry doesn't seem to be doing a good job.

Recyclers need to embrace this reality. Indeed, the grant participants have done so. In fact, part of the reason why they voluntarily participated, was to help change this perception. In conversations with participants, they collectively realize that an educational campaign needs to be targeted to all recyclers reminding them that these harmful views are a part of their reality. They have to take ownership of this negative perception and accept the responsibility to do something about it. However, the first step toward accepting ownership is to take control of where e-waste is going downstream.

This may be deeper than what the external auditor expects. This is where the tracking services come in. With this service, one can actually see the flow of where their covered electronic devices are flowing and get real-time maps and timestamped data reports to compare against theoretical flowcharts, Bill Of Lading (BOLs) and assumed processing activity. This quantitative analysis can help understand the BOL invoices that are coming from trucking carriers against actual hard data. Unfortunately, due to Covid19 constraints, not many of the participants had the chance to deploy their trackers. But when they have the opportunity to do so, the insights gained can move into the ownership phases. What does that entail? We will discuss this in part 2.