The Dose Card With Three Numbers on It

A new agency porter starts on a Monday, gets a six-minute handover at the bin, and is expected to dose correctly by Tuesday. The card by the bin has twelve lines of instructions and a QR code. By Wednesday the card is behind a shelf and the porter is dosing by eye, which is how a 120-litre bin ends up with 700 g in it.

A dose card is not a training document. It is a decision aid for someone standing in front of a bin with wet hands, and it has to work in about four seconds.

Three numbers, one picture

The version that survives contact with a real kitchen has three numbers and one photograph: grams per bin for that specific bin, the wait time before tipping, and a phone number. The photograph shows a correctly set bin, taken in that room, with that bin, next to a scoop.

Everything else — why the polymer works, what to do about starch, how to store the sack — belongs in the induction, not on the wall. Twelve-line cards get read once and never again, because the reader cannot find the one line that applies to the bin in front of them.

What goes in each of the three slots

• Dose: grams for this bin at its usual fill, plus a second figure for a full bin. Two numbers, not a formula.
• Wait: minutes before the lid goes down and the bin goes out, expressed as a clock time if the shift is fixed — ‘dose by 21.45, out at 22.15′ is clearer than ’30 minutes’.
• Escalate: who to call when the bin is still wet, and what not to do. ‘Do not add a second scoop’ earns its own line.

Add the bin number in large type at the top. Sites with four bins and one card are the ones that get doses wrong, because the card is usually written for the smallest bin and applied to all of them.

The failure: a good card in the wrong language

A hotel with a large international brigade printed a beautifully designed card in English only. Half the porters read it, nodded, and went back to dosing by feel — not from carelessness, but because the numbers were the only part they needed and the words around them were noise. The site eventually reprinted with numerals at three times the size and the English reduced to six words.

Compliance went from roughly half the bins dosed to nearly all of them within two weeks. Nothing about the polymer changed.

Testing the card before you laminate it

Hand it to someone who has never dosed a bin and ask them to dose one while you watch, without speaking. If they hesitate for more than a few seconds, or reach for a scoop twice, the card is wrong. Fix it and test again with a different person.

Then laminate it, mount it at eye level beside the bin rather than on the wall behind it, and clean it weekly — a card you cannot read through grease is a card that does not exist. Put the date in the corner and reissue whenever the dose changes, because a card that contradicts the store room is worse than no card at all.

Change control, or the card becomes a lie

A dose card is a controlled document even if it is written by hand. When the menu changes, when a new bin arrives, when the supplier swaps grade — the card has to change the same day, or the crew learns that the card is unreliable and stops reading it.

Give one person ownership. Their name goes in small print at the bottom, with the issue date. When they leave, someone else inherits a document with a name on it, which is a stronger handover than a note in a folder nobody opens.

Keep the old cards. When a bin starts failing in March, the card from January tells you what changed.

Keep a copy in the induction pack as well, so the first shift has something to refer to before the bin room. The dosing tables are the right source for the numbers; the card is just the delivery mechanism.