Developing An Online Tool For Waste Auditing

The Behaviouralist partnered with a global pharmaceutical company to develop an engaging, user-friendly tool enabling employees across its international offices to conduct office waste audits. With new EU sustainability directives on the horizon, the company wanted a solution that would simplify the audit process, generate reliable data and make sustainability feel both accessible and enjoyable for staff. We created a guided digital experience that helps users accurately record audit results, while also educating them about why these actions matter.

Large organisations frequently ask their staff to complete tasks such as collecting data for reporting, obtaining certifications, or participating in educational programmes. While these activities are important, and often essential, they can be time-consuming and uninspiring. Gamification can be a powerful way to increase staff motivation and engagement. 

Our approach

We began by reviewing the relevant EU Directive and interviewing the company’s sustainability champions across several global offices. These conversations helped us understand variations in waste systems across offices, as well as differences in employees’ confidence levels and attitudes toward waste audits. These insights informed our decision to build a gamified tool that would break the audit into simple steps, motivate users and ensure high-quality data collection. The tool was developed as part of a broader company-wide sustainability campaign.  

The Waste Audit Tool

The Waste Audit Tool is designed as a guided narrative between the user and a fictional mentor to make the audit process more interactive and engaging.

The audit is broken down into six manageable steps to reduce perceived effort and create a sense of progress. Users begin by providing general office information, such as the number of bins, waste systems in place, office size, and employee count, before recording waste quantities across different streams at various times of the day. This structure enables the collection of more granular insights into daily waste generation patterns without overburdening employees.

Throughout the experience, gamification elements, including a progress bar, milestone badges, and encouraging prompts, are applied to keep users engaged. In addition, the interface is intuitive and supported by illustrations to ensure users can accurately record multiple waste streams while keeping the process enjoyable.

At the end of the audit, users are presented with a clear summary of the collected data and an explanation of how the results will be used, reinforcing their sense of impact and achievement.

Impact

The Waste Audit Tool provided the company with a single tool that employees across its global offices can use independently to conduct compliant waste audits. By creating a story-driven experience, we reduced the cognitive and emotional barriers typically associated with sustainability tasks, while ensuring a consistent process that generates comparable data across all offices. 

This project also highlights a broader challenge faced by many large corporations: internal education, audits, and compliance tasks require employee time and engagement, and can be difficult to enforce effectively. Gamification offers a practical solution to increase participation and improve the quality of voluntary contributions.

We are now partnering with this pharmaceutical company to develop a gamified ‘Unconscious Bias game’ for staff training, which further demonstrates how interactive, behavioural science-led tools can strengthen internal learning and compliance processes.