Why

A good law with a bad onboarding.

SB 1383 is California’s short-lived climate pollutant law. Its goals are the right ones. Its design assumes a resident who reads the notice, finds the form and signs up, and then pays a fee for the privilege. Hardly anyone does.

• 27Mtons of organic wasteCalifornia’s single largest waste stream, in 2017. Decomposing, it is a major source of methane.
• 1 in 8Californians are food insecureAbout 4.9 million people, in the state that wastes the most food.
• 1 in 5childrenAbout 7.8 million, while edible food goes into the same bins as the rest.
• 6M+tons of food wasted a yearThe law asks for 75% less organic waste in landfill by 2025 and 20% of edible food recovered.

1. 1Nobody knows it exists. Most residents have never heard of the mandate, let alone the collection program they are meant to join.
2. 2Registration is on the resident. A complicated sign-up that the household or business has to start, on its own, with no prompt.
3. 3Apartments are an afterthought. The scheme is drawn for a house with its own bins, not a building with one row of them.
4. 4The fee came before the value. Residents were told they would pay for the process before most had enrolled, and the law is “encouraged”, not enforced.

How it runs

Three parties, one scan.

1. IDisposal, the residentScan the tag or the QR code on the bin’s reader, throw the organic waste away. That is the whole task.
2. IIData, the systemThe bin sends the household, the weight and the time to California’s environmental database.
3. IIIFinance, the administratorThe database bills each household from its own data and credits the points, with no registration step in between.

Three ways to read a tag, because a detached house, an apartment block and a restaurant do not throw things away the same way.

• Individual weighing

  Where

  Multifamily housing, apartments

  How

  Each household’s disposal is weighed at the shared bin and the fee follows the weight.

• Vehicle collection

  Where

  Restaurants, markets, large organisations

  How

  The collection truck weighs each tagged container; one reading per container, per pickup.

• Portable scanner

  Where

  Detached houses, small restaurants

  How

  A dedicated container with its own tag, read by a handheld scanner by frequency and volume.

The app

The resident’s side: a code, a map, and the points.

1 2 3

01One button, and a reason to press it.

1. 1The points come first: 1,200 P in a ring, and how many disposals until the next level. The behaviour the law wants is the thing the app counts.
2. 2Scan My Code is the centre of the screen. For a household without a phone, the same code is printed on an ID card; the bin reads either.
3. 3The first time at a bin, six drawn steps: hold the QR or the RFID tag to the reader, then throw the waste away.

1 2 3 4

02Where to throw it, and what you threw.

1. 1Search an address, or let the GPS find you; the list of all bins is one tap away.
2. 2Every bin nearby as a dot, with a refresh, because in an apartment block the nearest bin is not always your own.
3. 3History by today, three months or six: each disposal with its date, time and place. The bill is explainable because the data is visible.
4. 4Analyze Usage turns the list into a trend, the part of the concept that shows people their own waste.

1 2 3

03Points that come back as something.

1. 1A deal of the day from a partner brand, next to the balance, so the reward is concrete before it is spent.
2. 2Two ways to spend: shop the market, or donate the points. A smaller bill and a reward point the same way.
3. 3The profile keeps the points in view and the rest in a plain list: alerts, terms, help.

The brand

A bin lid for a mark, and a name that says take back.

RE:Tract, as in retract: take the waste back out of the landfill. The mark is a pedal bin reduced to a lid and a handle, in a deep teal on soft gradient blobs, so a civic system reads as calm rather than municipal.

• Deep teal#1E3A4A · The mark, the dark backgrounds
• Mint#ADE8E7 · The blobs, the soft surfaces
• Blue#008DDD · The app’s actions and headers

Try it

The prototype, and the deck it came from.

Outcome

A system on paper, and the questions it leaves.

1. 1What it settles. Registration disappears as a step; the fee follows the weight; the resident is paid for the behaviour the law wants. The three methods cover a house, a block and a restaurant.
2. 2What it expects. Faster adoption than a self-started sign-up, bills without human error, more edible food recovered, and less methane as the waste falls.
3. 3What it leaves open. Who pays for the tags and the readers, how a household’s weighing data is kept private, and what happens when a tag is shared or lost.
4. 4Why speculative. It is a design argument about a policy, not a product with a customer. The value is in showing that the law’s failure is an onboarding problem, and that onboarding can be designed away.