I want to design a dish vending machine and reverse vending machine as well as reusable dish for Snack Street in Beijing.
From the map you can see there is many snack streets in Beijing. The red dots are just some biggest ones. There are just some biggest snack streets in Beijing. Especially, the most famous snack street, Wangfujing street. In 2011, The amount of people who want to go to Wangfujing street reached 40 thousands to 50 thousands a day. During holiday, the amount of people will increase to 100 thousands people a day. This result large of disposable dishes and food waste are produced everyday, it is about 18 tons. Due to the lack of recycling technology, Beijing government couldn't find the best way to treat the 18 tons of garbage or recycle them properly, therefore, most of the garbage are directly sent to the landfill. If we don't reduce the disposable dishes usage, more and more used dishes will send to landfill. Also, because there are too many people go to snack streets which also bother the cleaner, as they need to keep working for more than 20 hours a day in order to clean all the dishes and food waste. So, I suggest to use reusable dish instead of disposable one.
Through finding information from the Internet, I found an article which is called An evaluation of energy consumption. This article use scientific method to compare the energy consumption between disposable and reusable dish. This article also shows that when the number of serving use more than one hundred times, two energy consumption is almost the same. Therefore, reusable dish is actually good for environment.
In Sydney, there are many similar PSS exist in the market, for example food court in Chinatown and TGV. They use reusable dish to serve customers. They clean the reusable dishes after customers finish eating. However, if large number of people come to eat. The small space will become crowd. The cleaner won't be able to move around with their trolley to collect and clean all the dishes and food waste. This is what happening to many biggest snack street in Beijing.
So, this PSS is what I want to design for Beijing Wangfujing. The tourists come to the entrance of Wangfujing Snack Street, and use 10yuan to get a dish and ticket to enter snack street from dish vending machine, and then use the dish to eat at snack street. After finish eating, they are required to bring the dish back to reverse vending machine, and discard the unwanted food to bin, return the dish and ticket to the machine. The machine will then give back their 5yuan.
The target market is for tourists and local people . By using this service, I want people to be able to change their behaviour, to use reusable dish and to reduce the use of disposable plates and pay attention to the environment.
I think in places like traditional night markets in some countries really need a system like this instead of using disposables, the waste created is enormous. This would be great if they really did work something out and implement it as it does reduce much unnecessary waste (paper plates and bleached chopsticks) and does address an environmental issues and resolution. In terms of the product i think it needs to be more reflective of the food or cultural aspects related to the designated areas. Would probably make it much more interesting and distinctive.
ReplyDeleteI think this concept is quite new to me, I never thought of things like this, but it appears to be very useful after understand this idea. Because there are lots of waste produced and they would need a system like this. Especially in Asian countries, where disposable plates are almost everywhere. In places like Hong Kong, Taiwan... They have a market of food, and only serves with just a stick or a paper plate. So I think it would be useful to have these machines. Even on Friday, the floor of China town are full of sticks and paper plates, so I think this machine would encourage them to dispose them in the bin, because I would give it a try if I see this machine.
ReplyDeleteI think this idea is pretty good, especially being used in food streets like these, it stops large amount of one use plates and cups thrown away as I know streets like these has a really dense traffic. By using this machine and having reusable dishes, it will constraint people from throwing it away and produce a large amount of trash. Nice idea ~!
ReplyDeleteBeing a Chinese, i really think your idea is very practical at snack streets in China.rubbish created in this kind of place is shocking, introducing the plate rental system really helps to reduce the amount of disposiable bowls and plates. however, there will be lots of people coming to the street and have dinner, so maybe you need to make the machine larger that contains more plates.
ReplyDeleteOr have lots of machines^^^
ReplyDelete