How well our waste is sorted affects the proportion of materials we can extract for recycling purposes. Waste sorting in itself relies heavily on the effort and the choices that each and every one of us makes in our daily routines.

At a shopping mall in Bergen, some tenants managed to reduce the amount of residual waste their shops produced by up to 80%, thanks to information and incentives for better sorting enabled by Carrot.

In this project, each shop nominated a sustainability officer responsible for onboarding - ensuring that both full-time and part-time employees used the Carrot app when handling waste from the shop.

The amount and different types of waste were tracked using quantity registration, providing both the tenants and the operation manager at the mall with a full overview of all waste and material flows. Digitizing the waste streams enabled the operations manager to follow up tenants with potential for improvement, in addition to making a fair cost distribution based on recycling efforts possible.

Carrot connects to existing infrastructure

Existing containers for different types of waste in the basement of the mall were equipped with smart locks and weight systems, and information materials across the mall were upgraded to enable the tenants to improve their waste sorting efforts.

With over a thousand full-time and part-time employees, the shopping mall shows that they can make a big difference by sorting more and handling waste smarter:

The shopping mall increased the sorting rate from 54% to 72%

The amount of residual waste was reduced by approximately 120,000 kilos per year

They increased the number of waste types from 18 to 23

The results show that information and incentives for better sorting make it easier and more motivating for shops and their employees to change to more sustainable behavior, and improve waste sorting.

At Carrot, we want to make it easier for everyone to improve their habits, enabling choices that generate less waste, bringing us closer to solving the world’s waste problem.

At Vestkanten in Bergen, a shopping mall consisting of 110 restaurants and shops, some tenants were able to reduce the amount of residual waste by 80% after implementing Carrot.

At Vestkanten in Bergen, a shopping mall consisting of 110 restaurants and shops, some tenants reduced the amount of residual waste by 80% after implementing Carrot.

Collecting data about waste enabled some tenants at Vestkanten Storsenter to reduce residual waste by 80%

BIR is Norway’s second-largest municipally-owned waste management company. The company is organized as a group and owns its entire value chain, providing unique opportunities for digitization and innovation. 

BIR has also been central to the development of Carrot’s software that makes it possible to reward people for sorting their waste; the less residual waste the household disposes of, the lower the fee.

This is made possible by Carrot's software that tracks the amount of waste each household throw away by connecting to access-controlled containers and digital collection registration on the garbage trucks. 

Bente Gansum Daazenko, general manager of BIR Privat AS, explains that by collecting information where waste is collected, they are able to implement the “polluter-pays principle” and thus motivate people to increase their sorting effort. If you throw less, you pay less.

- The introduction of an incentive-based fee model and Carrot’s software has made it possible for us to develop our business models further. This is how the waste industry can participate in future value creation enabled by new technologies, Daazenko continues.

Carrot’s software is designed to simplify administrative processes and connects easily to new methods for registering and monitoring different types of waste. Tracking waste to identify what is eligible for recycling, reuse or repurposing is crucial for creating a circular economy.

The results from Bergen are uplifting: people have become aware of which types of waste can be returned to the cycle simply by sorting better. Increased sorting is both beneficial for the environment and people’s wallets.

- With the introduction of a flexible fee model, we saw a 9% reduction in residual waste and a 28% increase in collected plastic. That is a good development, Daazenko believes.

People also reported experiencing the flexible fee model as a positive measure and found it easier to be environmentally friendly.

Carrot has for a long time worked purposefully to reduce technological complexity and create new systems for sustainable waste management for a long time. By combining smart IoT solutions with customer-friendly services, people at home can be involved and rewarded in new ways. This way, we reduce the amount of unsorted residual waste and capture more of the materials that have value in circular value chains.

Results show a 9% reduction in collected residual waste, and being rewarded with a lower waste fee has proven to be a motivating factor for people in the city. 

In Bergen, the second-largest city in Norway, the publicly-owned waste management company BIR has had great success with Carrot. Results show a 9% reduction in collected residual waste, and being rewarded with a lower waste fee has proven to be a motivating factor for people in the city.

Use cases

Collecting data about waste enabled some tenants at Vestkanten Storsenter to reduce residual waste by 80%

Rewarding households in Bergen for sorting efforts resulted in a 9% reduction in collected residual waste