City Food-Waste Service Architect

The mandate

The city plans to extend separate food-waste collection, but pilots used intensive communication and routes that do not match dense apartments, street markets, restaurants and peripheral districts. Contractors report tonnes collected while treatment sites report contamination and residents report missed bins, odour and inaccessible caddies. The defined problem is to create one service model that connects participation, collection, material quality, treatment acceptance and neighbourhood consequence.

The named deliverable is a City Food-Waste Service Architecture covering property and business segmentation, container and liner provision, access, communication, collection frequency, route and vehicle design, contamination feedback, missed service, market and hospitality peaks, transfer, treatment acceptance, contractor evidence and public reporting. It will include neighbourhood archetypes, decision rights, demand and capacity models, service states, procurement requirements and a staged rollout.

Four milestones govern five months. By week four, milestone one reconstructs forty collection journeys across eight neighbourhoods. Week nine delivers archetypes, contamination and full-cost baselines with service alternatives. Week fifteen concludes simulations for heatwave, market peak, vehicle loss, treatment rejection and apartment access. At week twenty, the final milestone supplies the accepted architecture, eight district plans, contract schedules, public measures and implementation backlog.

Acceptance rests with the city chief operating officer and Environment Commission, with environmental and public-health officers retaining their judgments. Work is accepted only when two district teams can plan and close five unseen cases, contractor and treatment evidence reconcile, inaccessible properties have a service route, and full cost includes communication, container replacement, rejected loads and remedy. Diversion claims must be traceable to accepted material, not bins issued.

The client authority provides property, route, tonnage, contamination, complaint, treatment, contract, cost and community evidence plus controlled field access. Consultants will not direct live collections, inspect private premises, certify treatment, interpret waste law, award contracts or run campaigns. Vehicle procurement, treatment expansion and technology implementation are excluded; unavailable evidence remains a stated rollout condition.

Why this is external work

Collection, housing, communications and treatment teams each own one part of the service, while existing contracts reward lifted tonnage. The city needs neutral architecture before procurement assumptions harden. External design brings neighbourhood evidence and end-to-end acceptance without taking statutory or live operating authority.

What you will own

• Reconstruct forty journeys from household or business participation through collection, transfer, treatment and feedback, including rejected loads, missed access, mixed-use properties and unresolved contamination.
• Segment neighbourhoods by housing, access, density, food activity, storage, language and seasonal demand across shared premises.
• Define decision rights among city teams, contractors, property managers, markets and treatment operators.
• Build route and treatment capacity including contamination, rejected loads, missed service and peak conditions.
• Exercise heatwave, market peak, vehicle loss, treatment rejection and apartment-access scenarios.
• Specify contract evidence, public measures, contamination response, remedy and escalation clocks.
• Deliver the accepted architecture, eight plans, procurement schedules and rollout backlog.

Candidate qualifications

• Has designed organics, recycling or comparable behaviour-dependent municipal collection services at metropolitan scale across dense housing, hospitality clusters, markets and constrained treatment outlets.
• Can evidence a rollout changed when collected tonnage did not equal accepted recoverable material after contamination losses.
• Understands property access, containers, contamination, routes, vehicles, treatment and public participation.
• Has aligned authorities and contractors without assuming procurement or statutory decisions.
• Can distinguish bins issued, lifts, collected weight, accepted material and durable household participation.
• Has run neighbourhood laboratories that exposed service inequality before citywide rollout.

Non-negotiables

• Can complete eight Milan neighbourhood laboratories and two seasonal simulations within five months.
• Will not direct collections, enter homes, certify treatment, interpret law or award contracts.
• Brings direct municipal waste-service architecture; circular-economy policy alone is insufficient.
• Will preserve missed service, rejected loads, inaccessible properties and contamination in public evidence.

1. 49 words maximum. Which organics metric most overstated successful diversion in a service you designed?
2. 49 words maximum. Describe a neighbourhood constraint that materially changed container or collection design.
3. 49 words maximum. What acceptance evidence proves collected food waste became usable treatment feedstock?