Turning waste infrastructure into social infrastructure.
How do you turn the Baltics' largest landfill into a place people choose to visit, contribute to, and come back to? We started by asking why sustainable choices feel so hard, then built REBOOT to make the better choice effortless.
The largest landfill in the Baltics, racing toward an EU deadline.
0t
waste processed every day
0.0M+
residents served
~0%
of waste still landfilled today
0%
EU target by 2035
Getliņi already does a lot well. Biogas from its waste powers around 5,000 households and heats nine hockey-field-sized greenhouses growing the cucumbers and tomatoes it is known for nationally. The gap is on the public side.
The new Environmental Education Center, opening in 2029, is Getliņi's bet on closing that gap. That framed our brief. We weren't designing a building to walk through once. We were designing reasons to take part again and again, so the Center earns a place in people's everyday lives.
From our field visit to Getliņi EKO
People weren't the problem. The system around them was.
Riga residents care about where their things end up. That was clear early, and it turned out not to be the interesting part. What mattered was that caring had been made inconvenient at every step.
Client
Getliņi EKO, Riga
Year
2025 · Sept to Dec
My role
Lead Researcher · Service Designer · Facilitator
Team
Catherine Martin, Khairunnisa Intiar, Qamar El Ali, Vishvak Rajendran, Aisha Orynaly, Anabelle Kathleen Makmur
Deliverables
The place is across the city
Taking part means a deliberate trip, competing with a shop five minutes away.
The rules are unclear until you arrive
Nobody wants to carry a broken thing across town to be told no.
The objects carry memories
The things people most want to deal with are the ones they can't bring themselves to let go of.
I treated this as a research problem first, and a design problem second.
Over the autumn we listened to 100+ people across five methods, each chosen to answer a different question.
In the interview
“I'd repair things if it were easy. I like the idea of donating.”
Almost everyone we spoke to
The morning the kettle dies
You need it before work. The shop is five minutes away. The repair café opens on Saturday.
So we stopped asking, and went to watch
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qualitative interviews
Riga residents and commuters. I ran several myself.
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survey participants
bilingual, English and Latvian
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co-creation workshop
residents and Getliņi staff. I co-led it.
Each method answered a different question
The interview technique
Asking someone what they usually do gets you a summary of who they think they are. So I asked about the last actual time instead.
From the co-creation workshop · “Repair & Reimagine Together”
Ethnography at Riga's Repair Café
The barrier was rarely how much people cared.
“Going to a shop five minutes from home to buy a new blender is more convenient than driving 40 minutes across the city to maybe fix it.”
“We don't know how to fix the things we care about, so they end up hidden in a box, waiting.”
What the interviews suggested
“People love repairing. Give them a place to do it and they will come.”
Framework · where the friction actually sits
Four numbers on their own are just complaints. Mapping them onto the COM-B model, which holds that behaviour needs capability, opportunity, and motivation together, showed which a service could realistically move. Pick one to see what it meant.
Three of the four sit in capability and opportunity: the parts a service can actually change. Only one is motivation, and it was not a deficit, because people wanted to act. That distribution is the whole argument of this project. It is why we stopped designing persuasion and started designing access.
The reframe that shaped everything
Sentiment isn't the obstacle. It's the opening.
If a story is what makes an object hard to give away, then letting the story travel with the object is what makes giving it away bearable, and what makes the next person want it. That reframe is why storytelling ended up at the centre of REBOOT rather than as a feature bolted onto it.
How might we make repairing and exchanging things feel as easy and rewarding as buying new, for everyone, not just the already-converted?
Three separate complaints, one shared cause: each adds effort at exactly the moment someone is deciding whether to bother. We weren't trying to make people care more. We were trying to make caring cost less, and to make acting feel good enough to repeat.
Reduce friction
Make the sustainable choice the easiest one in the room, not the one that asks the most of people.
Make it social
Turn private effort into something shared and visible, so doing good feels good in front of others.
Bridge physical and digital
Let the space and the app carry each other, so neither has to do the whole job alone.
An exchange and repair hub where the story travels with the object.
Bring in what you no longer use
An object you've kept but stopped needing.
Record the story that goes with it
A memory, or a tip for looking after it.
Take home something passed on
Someone else's object, with their story attached.
Repair in the same room
Not a separate zone, and not a separate trip.
The exchange journey, end to end
The companion app
The app is built on Getliņi's existing digital presence rather than as a new product to maintain. It tracks a person's exchanges and impact, suggests what to do next, and answers the “will my item even be accepted?” question before anyone makes the trip.
Each step answers something specific from the research: the distance that stopped people travelling, the uncertainty about what would be accepted, the missing skills and tools, and the memories that made an object hard to let go of. I authored the service blueprint that maps the whole thing front-stage and back-stage, in enough detail for Getliņi to run it day to day.
The full report
Everything this page leaves out.
The complete service blueprint, the operating model, and the phased rollout to 2029: the working document behind the concept, rather than the story of how we got there.
Open the full case study reportWe didn't stop at a concept. We prototyped it and put it in front of people.
We ran a working prototype with 20 participants, asked them to bring objects they no longer used, then walked them through a real exchange, a repair, and the app.
Validated
People actually exchanged
An umbrella for home décor. Sunglasses for string lights. Nobody had to be prompted, which told us the core mechanic was sound.
Validated
Storytelling was the part that stuck
People lingered over objects' stories and enjoyed writing their own. 80% said storytelling or community features would bring them back.
Changed by testing · the design moved because of what we saw
What we drew
Two zones, each with its own entrance and its own reason to visit.
What we built after watching
One space. People kept crossing between them, so we stopped making them choose.
Where it landed
Getliņi EKO received the concept and committed to taking initiatives toward implementing it.
Their commitment was to the direction, meaning the exchange-and-repair concept and the intent to act on it, rather than to a specific build.
The shift that did the most work
Where we started
People are lazy.
Where we landed
People face friction.
That one move mattered more than any single feature, and it's why I now test how a problem is framed before reaching for solutions.
What I owned.
REBOOT was developed by a team of six. The concept was shaped jointly; the research and the service blueprint were mine.
Lead researcher
I shaped the research plan and pulled the findings from interviews, ethnography, survey, and workshop into the insight the rest of the concept was built on.
Service blueprint
I mapped the full front stage and back stage, in enough detail for Getliņi to run the service day to day.
Workshop facilitation
I co-led the co-creation workshop and ran the Three Whys and journey-mapping sessions, which surfaced the motivations people don't usually say out loud.
Partnership talks
I made the first call to Riga's Repair Café to arrange our visit, and afterwards opened the conversation between Getliņi EKO and Repair Café Rīga, our closest real-world reference.
What I'd carry forward.
We ran the workshop with six rotating facilitators. It spread ownership across the team, but it also made the energy uneven and forced participants to re-settle each time someone new stepped in. Next time I'd push for one consistent lead with the others supporting, so the session reads as a single arc.
The hardest part, it turned out, wasn't facilitation. It was getting clear on the purpose and outcomes before we started. Once that was settled, the rest fell into place.
Sustainability doesn't fail because people don't care. It fails because caring is made hard. REBOOT is designed to make it easy, and worth coming back for.
The service blueprint, the operating model, and the rollout are in the full report.
Open the full case study report