VerdraaidGoed is a circularity consultancy with expertise in upcycling the waste of organisations. They are growing rapidly, and a scalable approach would be advantageous, so the company can expand without compromising performance and revenue. The assignment of this thesis is to
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VerdraaidGoed is a circularity consultancy with expertise in upcycling the waste of organisations. They are growing rapidly, and a scalable approach would be advantageous, so the company can expand without compromising performance and revenue. The assignment of this thesis is to find the best approach for the activities of VerdraaidGoed.
Research was conducted in two areas: a literature review was done, and existing practices were observed and questioned extensively. The literature study resulted in aspects that would be beneficial to include in the design, such as flexibility, setting criteria, planning and reflection, encouraging leadership, and guiding to a result that is competitive, healthy for human welfare, environmentfriendly, and stimulates entrepreneurship.
From the broad company and project analysis, a deep understanding of the upcycle projects arose. These projects have three stages: advice, development and sale. The approach used in the advice stage is the focus of this thesis and was observed thoroughly. It involves scanning a client organisation, looking for the potential of produced waste and giving advice on how to deal with the waste. From this, gaps in the approach and used tools were discovered. The opportunities for improvement include the assessment of all materials, equal elaboration of all results, adding more tools and creating a possibility for integration with a database. Next to the observations, interviews were held with all user types of the approach. That resulted in the extra notes that the approach could be shareable and clear visuals were needed to convey the approach and steps within it.
The synthesis of all the insights lead to three overarching themes: clear structure, effective design, efficient resources. These three themes summarise what the final design of the approach needs to inherit. With these three themes, a very iterative design process was completed which resulted in a final design.
The final design consists of one metaphor, two approaches, six processes, ten tools and thirty-one activities. The metaphor, approach and processes are visuals, because quick understandability is its decisive function. The activities and tools are elaborated in an instruction manual form, with accessible instructions to follow and easy to use tools.
This project resulted in an approach tailored to VerdraaidGoed with scalability possibilities, which will allow VerdraaidGoed to grow without compromising themselves, so they can become a worldwide expert on circularity and upcycling in particular.