The new and improved food court at Westfield Knox in Melbourne has been live since late last year and whilst the final product looks really nice and is delivering great results, this post is also about the process.
Charopy had been engaged with with Scentre Group Head Office for some time when we were contacted by their Head of Sustainability about a planned renovation at Knox. Whilst Charopy works with a lot of clients on retrofitting our technology to existing bins, it is great to be contacted at the inception of a new project to ensure our solution is an integrated part of the design and not just an afterthought. This allows the team at Charopy to give the design team our learnings on best practice when it comes to integrating a Container Deposit Scheme (CDS) collection within a shopping centre environment, or any other location for that matter.
From that initial request we ended up talking to the Scentre Group design team, the construction team at Scentre Group and their contractors at BCI Furniture. In this case our standard panel was exactly what they were after. Cost effective, elegant, and easy to service. We discussed how some shopping centres are using digital screen content from Charopy to maximise engagement, but in this case the client wanted to launch with something more simple, whilst keeping space above the bin for a future digital screen implementation if desired.
There are so many places where Charopy technology makes sense, but food courts may be the most obvious of all. You have significant purchase, consumption and disposal of single use drink containers, you have dwell time as people are seated and can be made more aware of your recycling initiatives, and you have the very real problem of traditional commingled bins frequently ending up in general waste and destined for landfill due to contamination. On top of this, you are paying more in waste removal by not effectively segregating CDS, plus you are missing out on the 10c deposit from the thousands of containers sold within your shopping centre. Major companies reporting annually on their sustainability targets is just one more reason to implement a CDS stream within a food court, but solving for contamination has traditionally been the biggest hurdle to moving forward on this.
Westfield Knox has joined a growing number of shopping centres around Australia to solve the problem of recycling bin contamination with the help of Charopy. Their implementation is not only highly functional, but looks absolutely amazing too.
