Brass, in partnership with Kate McGeevor (Policy Studies Institute), was commissioned by DEFRA to carry out a design-led action research study about food waste as part of a drive to find ways of reducing rising costs of sending biodegradable waste to landfill. Combining policy research with design methodologies, DEFRA wanted to explore technological and behavioural change as a way of innovating waste policy. Working with London Borough of Camden and piloted on a housing estate in Kings Cross, FoodLoop builds significantly on existing research into food-waste separation (New Economics Foundation/Open University 2009), and greater co-production in public services (Boyle and Harris 2009), adopting collaborative and service-design processes to create circular waste systems tailored to their environment.
Uniquely, FoodLoop proposes a package of products and services to reduce biodegradable waste across social housing, where food waste is difficult to collect(Brook Lyndhurst 2008). The research uncovered new insights into barriers to and opportunities for waste management in an area previously unexplored by design; the report set out a series of recommendations for policymakers, local authorities and practice-based researchers.
Brass led the team in the design aspects of the research, including the design and implementation of technological interventions to establish a new food-waste collection/food-growing system to be rolled out across other estates, including a new fertiliser product for the market.
Brass proposed and developed the FoodLoop concept as part of a wider research focusing on using design in new ways to encourage pro-environmental behaviours and developing design-led enterprise solutions to social and environmental issues. Its legacy is a community-run self-sustaining, scalable enterprise, enabling housing estate residents across the UK to generate income from the sale of gardening products resulting from the composting process.
Related outputs include the journal article, ‘Can an Urban Community Run its own Waste Services Independently?’ (Architectural Design, 2012).