Vestkanten Shopping Mall:
from 54% to 72% sorting rate

The Challenge: A growing sorting problem

Vestkanten Shopping Mall is one of Bergen's largest retail destinations, with over 110 individual shops and a waste management challenge that had grown alongside the mall's success. By 2017, the mall's waste manager faced a familiar problem: a growing volume of waste, an unclear picture of what was being sorted correctly, and tenants who had little visibility into their own sorting performance.

The mall was sorting at a rate of approximately 54% — meaning nearly half of all waste was being sent to incineration as residual waste. This represented both an environmental and a financial problem. Residual waste is significantly more expensive to process than properly sorted fractions, and the environmental cost of incineration was at odds with the mall's sustainability commitments.

"We knew we had a problem, but we didn't know where to start. We couldn't see which tenants were sorting well and which weren't. Without that data, it was impossible to have meaningful conversations or drive improvement." — Waste Manager, Vestkanten Shopping Mall

Reduced Residual Waste

The primary goal of the Carrot deployment was to reduce the volume of residual waste — materials being sent to incineration that could instead be recycled. Within the first year of deployment, residual waste began to fall measurably as tenants gained visibility into their own data.

By 2020, total residual waste had fallen from approximately 270,000 kg/year to 150,000 kg/year — a reduction of more than 80,000 kg annually. This translated directly into cost savings on waste disposal and a significant reduction in carbon emissions from incineration.

Counting Everything

A key element of Vestkanten's success was moving from estimate-based waste tracking to a data-driven approach that captured every fraction — paper, cardboard, plastic, glass, food waste, and residual — at the individual tenant level.

Before Carrot, waste data was aggregated across the entire mall, making it impossible to identify which shops were performing well and which were contaminating otherwise clean fractions. Carrot's registration suite changed that completely.

Each time a waste collection was made, data on the fraction type and volume was captured and attributed to the relevant tenant. Over time, this built up a detailed picture of sorting performance that the mall's waste manager could use to identify patterns, intervene with underperforming tenants, and celebrate improvements.

Carrot Connects to Existing Infrastructure

One of the key concerns for Vestkanten's management team was the potential cost and disruption of deploying a new waste management platform. They had existing bin infrastructure, existing waste collection contracts, and 110 tenants with established habits.

Carrot's integration model addressed this directly. Rather than replacing existing bins or requiring new waste collection contracts, Carrot connected to Vestkanten's existing waste infrastructure using hardware adapters and a manual registration workflow for tenants.

The deployment was completed in phases over eight weeks. In phase one, the registration system was rolled out to the ten largest shops by waste volume. In phase two, the remaining 100 shops were onboarded over four weeks. By the time the full platform was live, tenants were already seeing their data and beginning to engage with the sorting recommendations.

"The onboarding was much smoother than we expected. The Carrot team worked with our waste operator to ensure nothing changed in our collection routines — we just gained a data layer on top of what we already had." — Facility Manager, Vestkanten Shopping Mall

Tenant engagement: the behavioural layer

Data alone doesn't change behaviour. Vestkanten's waste manager worked with the Carrot team to design a tenant engagement programme that combined data transparency with social competition.

Each tenant received monthly sorting reports showing their performance against the mall average and their own historical data. The top-performing tenants each quarter were recognised in the mall's internal newsletter. Underperforming tenants received direct outreach from the waste manager, now armed with specific data to guide the conversation.

Within 12 months, 85% of tenants had viewed their sorting dashboard at least once. Of those, 73% had made at least one visible change to their sorting behaviour based on their data.