Signage system

E-ink screens at the right time and place

Recycling centres have a big issue with recycling, they can only cleanly recycle their waste if it’s correctly sorted, otherwise contamination can result in the less efficient recycling or prevent recycling altogether. Therefore it’s important for the recycling centres that their users know where to put their waste and that it gets sorted as correctly as possible. The signage is therefore mounted to the specific recycling containers, so that the users are given the right information at the right time — just before they are about to throw their waste into the container. The signage is color-coordinated by easily distinct colors and iconography, so that every container is easily identifiable at both short and long distances.

The iconography used is created by Dansk Affaldsforening and danish goverment to be used on all kinds of packaging, so that there becomes 1:1 relationship between our waste and the place recycle where we can recycle it.

Admin panel

“Signage-CMS” for the workers

The signage system can only be great if the information shown is up to date and accurate. Therefore I also designed an admin panel where the workers can control and update the signage. It consists of a overview map that shows the status of all containers in the recycling centre, so that the workers can at a glance see what’s closed, what’s open and where everything is.

It’s all control by a “What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get” templating system for the signage. Here the workers step-by-step fill out the information they would like to show and then in real-time can see a preview of how that would translate into the signage on the containers. Making it easy for them to experiment and optimize how the recycling centre communicates.