Bootcamp #7 – Romania, May 2024

Sector 6 Sustainability Bootcamp: Creative Strategies for Community Engagement in Recycling

in partnership with with Sector 6 City Hall Buchareset

In May of 2024, we came together with Antropedia and Namla in Bucharest to host a local bootcamp on Sustainability. We gathered a group of artists and anthropologists to work on a question put forward by the Municipality of Sector 6, a segment of Bucharest where a few hundred thousand people live.

In line with the EU’s Waste Framework Directive, our partner, Sector 6 City Hall, is implementing a massive change in waste management by introducing a separate waste collection system. Over 800 recycling stations, in the four well known colours, for paper, glass, plastic and the rest, were being installed in Sector 6 of Bucharest by the end of 2024.

A timely measure, as Romania has been lagging well behind with recycling and is at risk of missing both the municipal waste (55%) and the total packaging waste (65%) recycling targets in 2025.

In this context, the question we worked on was: what solutions can we find to inspire strategies and public policies through which the local administration can encourage the residents of Sector 6 to adopt and correctly use the separate waste collection infrastructure?

Poster by Andreea Moise

The bootcamp had 13 participants divided over 4 teams. Every team had at least one artist. We had a few people with a background in illustration and comics, two mural artists, and an actress.

Each team selected a specific aspect of the problem presented by the Municipality. It was interesting for us, as the organisers, to observe how topics chosen by the teams independently, ultimately complemented each so well.

“Treasurable Trash” Team: Roxana Alexa, Alex Papa and Robert Similea

They started in the home and thought about how separating trash becomes a lot easier if you already have the right bins in the kitchen. They looked at the gender aspect as well of ‘who takes out the trash?’ and asked a lot of people on the street this question as a way to strike up a conversation about trash, separation, and how it works in the household. The solution they designed was a cardboard trash bin, that could be sent to all dwellers of sector 6 when the new bins will start to be in use.

Alex Papa illustrated the concept and created a short comic strip inspired by the team’s interviews with Sector 6 residents

Team A.S.A.P. (Art-Sociology-Anthropology-Perspective): Max (Roxana-Andreea Iordache), Carmen Voinea and George Bonea

This team thought about the walk from home (particularly in an apartment complex) to the trash bins across the street from the entrance to the complex. They thought about trust a lot as well. There were a lot of rumours on the street about the trash being separated by citizens but still collected by one truck or going to one location. The team wondered what would be needed for the citizens to trust that the new system was really in effect, and/or that their efforts had any merit. The solution they proposed was to have a little local festival, every time a trash island would be taken into use. They also proposed asking graffiti/street artists to help decorate the walls behind, or the electricity houses near, the new trash stations, so that they became a place of art, rather than (as they usually look now) a place of disrepair.

Andreea Iordache (Shadowss Crowss)  illustrated the concept and created a short comic strip inspired by the team’s idea for strengthening neighborhood communities.

“Recycling Informants (RIN)” Team: Andreea Radu, Atena Bercuci and Paul Carpen  

RIN team thought a lot about privacy and transparency. They were quite alarmed when they heard that the new trash islands involved cameras being pointed at them. They focused much of their research on the communication that the municipality sends out and to which extent the citizens can ‘read’ it; can a citizen judge if the communication is transparent, complete, on time? They ended up focusing their solution around transparent information, for example in elevators, and on the doors of trash shoots: posters that serve the purpose of alerting people that the new system has started, but also contain a QR code where you can read a lot more background information, such as how the trash is getting picked up and sorted, scientific evidence of the use of separating trash or what will happen to recyclable materials.

Andreea Radu created a visualisation of the concept.

“Skeptical Sarmale (SS)” Team: Alina Apostu, Francesca Boni, Ioana Sabău and Romelia Călin

SS team thought about the role of Home Owners’ Associations, as they could be empowered and help get people excited for the new greener future, but currently had to answer a lot of annoying questions from the apartment dwellers with no information being handed to them on the other side. Their solution was to put at the disposal of the Associations an “info-toolkit” including monthly newsletters, invitations to consultations, flyers, posters and even a calendar for each block entrance.

Ioana Sabău and Francesca Boni created a visualisation of the concept.

Pitches

The Municipality team came back after our week of bootcamp to hear the pitches of the four teams. They were very interested in the results and surprised by the human insights and yet very practical solutions that our participants proposed. In the long run, they said they will probably be implementing at least one – if not all – of the solutions!

Artworks beyond the bootcamp

The bootcamp’s  theme inspired the creation of a mural painting. Ioana Sabău and Francesca Boni spent one week after the bootcamp painting a beautiful story on a 3 m wall inside St. Mary’s Special Vocational School for the Hearing Impaired (Școala Profesională Specială pentru Deficienți de Auz ”Sfânta Maria”, Sector 6).

 

The bootcamp’s theme also inspired the creation of a short film – a video methapor about nature – by Roxana Alexa.

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