Local Authority Household Waste Recycling Discs – Consider the residents who need help!

Public information produced on leaflets by national government, local authorities and county councils can easily become a waste of money, particularly if the message is important an needs to hit home. No matter how important the information might be, if the leaflet is sent to a household by mail in a white DL envelope then it runs the risk of being categorised as junk mail and the chance of getting the point across will be lost.

The information should be presented in a way that encourages the recipient to actually read it. Choosing an interactive and user-friendly information tool is the way to go and wheel charts are a terrific marketing idea and can supply the answer to many problems. However, the product will need to be thought out properly as there are many considerations and boxes that need to be ticked in order to design a truly useful and user-friendly product. A typical example would be a recycling wheel.

As more and more authorities are changing old fashioned waste collection services into sophisticated recycling operations the household residents of the borough become more and more befuddled about what goes where – “does this baked bean tin go in the green bin or the brown one” and so on. Recycling information discs are a relatively new phenomenon and they are catching on but are they really helpful to all of the residents in the borough? There are no BSI guidelines for this product and many UK printers are working with local authorities to produce their own version of the disc. A trawl of the local authority websites tells us that each authority seems to run its own household recycling colour schemes and so each recycling disc produced by each authority is different. However, they do have one thing in common and that is that they are designed to tick all the boxes for the local authority but with little consideration for the users.

The residents of the borough who are the most likely to have problems with the recycling wheels are the ones who need most help in the first place. Elderly people who might have restricted mobility in their hands will struggle to operate the wheels and the print is so small that anyone with failing eyesight will also have a problem reading the information. A person with reading difficulties would find the discs easier to understand if the design had incorporated symbols or pictures. Half of the information on the discs is upside down which is confusing and the arrangement of the text on the wheel is often arrange anti-clockwise which creates confusion. There are other design faults but the point is already made. These enterprising local authorities have taken a large step in the right direction in opting to use an interactive tool but they really should have made the product with the user in mind.

The whole point of making an information disc is to pass on information in a useful, informative and easy-to-use fashion. Wheel charts are brilliant providing that the user is given proper consideration at the design stage. Our recycling wheel has addressed that issue and provides the perfect product for local authorities.