Each site alone, or as a district
Why districts
A district is large enough to make shared systems viable, and small enough for the people involved to agree and act. Scale cuts both ways. A café cannot keep a washing line busy, and a hospital on its own rarely produces enough clean food waste for a compost site. A whole city has the volume, but also hundreds of owners, public tenders and electoral cycles that slow every decision. A district sits in between: pooled volumes large enough to size shared infrastructure, and few enough parties to agree terms, weigh every flow and show results within one programme cycle.
Objectives
How a district is built
What changes at each site
Interventions are worked in the same order everywhere, from redesign down to recycling.
Shared infrastructure
Five stages
Nothing is built until the flows have been weighed. Plants running far below capacity because the material never arrived, or arrived contaminated, are one of the most common problems in the sector, and every district follows the same five stages to avoid it.
Benefits for each group
Everyone involved gets something different out of a district.
Partners and roles
A district depends on cooperation between organisations that rarely sit at the same table. Each one has a clear part to play.
The challenge in numbers
The first cohort
Nine districts are running in four countries. They work from the same playbooks and report in the same format, so improvements found in one district reach the others quickly. Cohort 1 runs through 2027.
Public progress
Every district has a public page, refreshed on a fixed schedule. Staff at the bin see what their sorting achieves, and published results help a programme continue through a change of administration.
Frequently asked questions
