- Team from Jockey Club Design Institute for Social Innovation spent 10 months on project
- Cardboard grannies welcome change, but designers say there is still more work to do
Wong Yuet-han is ready to guard her new trolley with her life, and swears she will fight off any public hygiene inspector who tries to take it from her.
The 67-year-old is part of Hong Kong's army of elderly people, mostly old women, who eke out a living by gathering cardboard scraps and polyfoam boxes to sell to recycling companies.
Her treasured trolley is an upgraded version of the common blue metal ones used by most "cardboard grannies" to move loads of up to 70kg each day.
It is a prototype designed and built by a team from the Jockey Club Design Institute for Social Innovation of Polytechnic University, as part of a 10-month social innovation project on the theme of "empathising with the elderly in the workplace".
Wong, who was given one of four new trolleys in August for a month-long trial, said: "I love it most because it beeps when someone touches it."
She was referring to its burglar alarm, one of the new features of the upgraded trolley.
Cardboard grannies move from street to street gathering waste materials and a day's toil will get them nearly HK$50 " enough for a bowl of barbecued pork rice and a cold drink at a fast food restaurant in Hong Kong.
Most of these waste collectors are aged between 60 and 79, with women outnumbering men by four to one, according to a study of 505 scavengers by Waste Picker Platform in March last year.
According to the Hong Kong Poverty Situation Report 2017, about 340,000 elderly people aged above 65 were living in poverty, even after the government provided them cash allowances. They make up about a third of more than a million people living in poverty in the city.
Wong, who worked in a public hospital before retirement and lives separately from her husband and two children, has been doing this work for five years, said her new trolley is a godsend, and has eased her burden.
The redesign project began last November, bringing together social activists from the Waste Picker Platform concern group, independent product designers, and members of the PolyU design institute.
The prototype is 1 1/2 times larger than normal trolleys, and also has foldable extension frames in front and on two sides, as well as belts to keep large and piling objects from falling off.
The trolley has been designed to make it easier to go onto kerbs. Instead of fixed wheels, it has castor wheels that turn 360 degrees freely, making it less of a hassle to manoeuvre when carrying a big load.
Waste collectors like Wong are sometimes accused of occupying public roads illegally, and driven away by public hygiene inspectors who confiscate their trolleys.
To help in such situations, the upgraded trolley has a toolkit with a phone number to call so that members of Waste Picker Platform will help to get it back.
"To fully understand the grannies' work, we conducted interviews with them, accompanied them to work and tried out different prototypes on roads on campus," said Lau Hin-chung, 36, a biomedical engineering teacher at PolyU.
"The grannies face a lot of uncertainties, ranging from an economic downturn to changes in recycling policies in Hong Kong and on the mainland."
Lau said that until he joined the 25-member team, he never imagined that anyone would steal a cardboard granny's trolley, but this sometimes happens. That is why the new trolley has a burglar alarm.
"All we can do at this stage is to make them a better tool," he said.
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However, Yeung Ka-hing, 50, an independent product designer in the team, said social innovators need to be more vocal in pushing for policy reform.
"The trolley is just a piece of hardware," he said. "We can't improve these elderly people's working and living conditions without an upgrade on software, which are the policies to recognise their status in the recycling industry, and to provide them better retirement protection."
The trolley is the first item Yeung has designed for the elderly.
Tang Wing-him, spokesman for Waste Picker Platform, said more education was needed for both the authorities, and the public, to understand the needs of these elderly people.
The trolleys on trial are helpful to cardboard grannies like Wong, but Tang said more needs to be done to improve the prototype.
"The design team needs to spend more time with the grannies to improve the product," Tang said. "The current version weighs 36kg, which is twice as heavy as an ordinary trolley."
For now, Wong is pleased with her new trolley, and enjoying the attention of passers-by who have seen her pushing it in Sheung Shui.
"Some curious people asked me where I got this interesting trolley and why I was collecting waste with it," she said.
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