Waste is a Failure of Design – The first year in review

We got this screenshot from a year ago. It was the start of spring, when every few days Anh told me a bunch of project ideas she was having. There was this one. I didn’t expect her to ask me to join though, and I didn’t think I would do it either. 

But yeah. I can!

Then there was this “logo”.

Originally we wanted to make a blog about topics we like or work on such as biodiversity loss, climate change, decarbonisation, then share our posts regularly on social media. We were so fascinated with the ideas of social media posts from Brain Pickings with quotes and some teasers to our articles that we started with designing the post templates.

Then we eventually decided to focus on writing and building the blog instead, since it seems to be a more suitable platform and we needed a strong core – the content – first. We bought the domain, and there came the web building tasks and the very first articles. Anh wrote like a machine in the first month. We published up to 9 articles in April 2021. 

Throughout the year, we set the goal of 20 in-house articles for the year 2021, and two from collaborators. We wanted to see if we can have articles from collaborators. Results? We did publish 22 articles, all in-house! Kudos to our writer Hoang Anh!

We covered all kinds of topics under the categories of “Solutions to waste”, “Regeneration” and “Less-waste lifestyle”. Why limit it to one thing? We later conducted interviews with people and opened the column “Opinions”. Those were great talks, and we will continue with a promising interview series this year as well. 

We also thought of doing articles in French and Vietnamese, but then we dropped them. No time. 

We tested different ways to format the articles, to put photo captions, cite sources, credits, related articles, etc. All kinds of stuff to get it going more smoothly. We got the first few comments, some likes when we shared the articles on our social media. I mention WIFD in any kind of conversations I have. Later all of my (close) friends know and remember that we have a blog and automatically show support when they saw something relevant. Yes, and did I say that my mom shared our article because I almost forced her? 

I guess if we persist, the world will listen? 

The warm months of 2021: I remember sitting on the grass with my laptop after work or at weekend, calling HA from my neighbourhood’s park. I mean we talked almost every week on WIFD, but those were the most vivid moments.

I would say 2022 is the start of our formal communication action. Before that, it was mostly word-of-mouth or personal communication. We thought of all, i.e. SEO, social media, but somehow we didn’t have the calling to do it. 

I think it’s good timing now: we have content to curate; we’ve got something to promote. Now we are working on some content campaigns on Instagram, including newsletters on energy, food waste, gardening, less-waste lifestyle. We have had posts for the whole month of March and April. We are launching our first newsletter #ENERGY soon, which contains information about decarbonised energies, emission, suggestions on energy transition, and so forth.

Here’s a screenshot of our blog right now: 

Once my friend asked what my “first five-year plan” was for this blog. I said, well, to keep it going for at least five years?

And so we continue to write…