Two years on from winning first prize for their recycling bins design at the National Ten Touchpoints competition, Chemistry is now proud to introduce the concept at Singapore’s Changi Airport.

Commissioned by the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore, Chemistry worked over a period of 10 months to create and deliver a totally customised design that would be deployed in 32 locations across all 4 terminals.

Although the final design at Changi is still based on the winning entry from the competition, Chemistry recognised that the concept needed to be re-evaluated in the context of the airport environment.

The new design is more compact to suit the space constraints at the airport. A modular connector system can efficiently line up the 3 bins (for bottles, cans and paper) in a linear orientation, or around columns and bends. This enables one generic design to be used anywhere around the airport, thus saving costs and providing the flexibility to move the bins to different locations.

A key component of Chemistry’s award-winning concept was the effective use of visual communication, not only to attract attention to the bins, but to also impart relevant information to the reader. The copy on the ‘newspaper’, ‘can’ and ‘bottle’ each carried examples of how much recycling Changi Airport had performed.

For example, rather than stating the amount of paper recycled at the airport in terms of Kilograms, Chemistry worked with the National Environment Agency to translate these figures into the equivalent of trees saved! This was part of the original concept to create a positive and tangible experience around the benefits of recycling, with the aim of getting people to recycle even more.

In order to deliver the best possible design for CAAS, Chemistry conducted a full site inspection, photographing all the 32 designated recycling points around the airport terminals. The team also interviewed airport service staff to find out how to specifically cater the design for refuse collection within the terminals. For example, featuring a turntable system allows the bin to rotate for easy replacement of the internal bin liner. Also, the addition of a security locking system means that bins cannot be accessed by non-authorised staff.

Chemistry helped CAAS draft the detailed Tender Specifications in order to award the task of building the first prototype and all 96 bins to an appropriate company. The team also participated in the interviewing and final selection of the candidate vendors. In addition, throughout the process of building the final bins, Chemistry was involved with the design and quality reviews with the selected vendor company to ensure that the product was delivered to specification.