Data Volunteer

Unwaste.io is a UK based social enterprise using data to create a circular economy for plastic. Our free app, Wastebase and cloud platform, wastebase dot org, collect data about plastic waste found in the environment. We want to use this data to encourage adoption of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) legislation. In other words, we want producers to take responsibility for where their waste ends up. Our data can help them do that.

We’re looking for a volunteer with a love of data and a passion for social impact. We’ve collected data points from over 360,000 plastic products in a dozen countries, including information about manufacturer, brand, product material, weight and location. We need you to help us tell the story of these products. This would be great experience for someone who wants to apply their skills in a real environment. We'll give you the space to be creative and suggest new ways to use our data.

Essential requirements

• Graduate or completed at least one year of undergraduate degree in a discipline with a numerical component

• Comfortable with spreadsheets and typical formats for tabular data

• Excellent written and spoken communication skills in the English language

• Skilled user of modern cloud-based office and collaboration tools

Desirable requirements

• Knowledge of any of the following technologies in the context of data analysis and visualisation: Javascript/Typescript, Python, SQL, D3/eCharts, Github

• Useful level of French or Swahili language

• Knowledge of the waste management, recycling or FMCG packaging industries.

• Experience of living or working in a country in the global south for an extended period (beyond a tourist visit)

• Demonstrable interest in delivering social impact and/or circular economy, plastic crisis or ocean pollution

Regular tasks

As part of this role, we will train you to complete certain regular tasks. Please use your creativity and experience to suggests improvements to these tasks:

Product records

Working with our partners, you will check and update products on the Wastebase portal where we are missing data. This is important to ensure our data is robust and accurate. You will also engage with our partners to support them to carry out data audits using Wastebase and to use our data in their reporting. 

Data report

Every month, we publish a data report on our website and through the Mailerlite platform. This is sent to a subscriber list and contains a summary of our data, for example, global polluter leaderboards and country totals. We would like you to:

• prepare the data for the report using our platform’s tools, Excel and Mailerlite templates and publish to our networks

• help to come up with ideas for how we can visualise our data in different ways

Kaggle

Every month we export our data to Kaggle. This allows anyone in the data science community to experiment with our data. Working with our Managing Director, you will update this data once per month and create the ‘waste ownership map’ visualisation.