The Resource Recovery Toolbox: Co-designing and curating a platform for promoting circularity in sanitation and waste management

The Resource Recovery Toolbox is an open-access knowledge platform that makes decision-support resources for resource recovery from organic waste streams easier to find, evaluate, and use, addressing a gap no existing platform had filled. Its structure, content categories, and interface features were shaped by direct engagement with practitioners, researchers, and decision-makers through card sorting exercises, usability testing, and a landscape review of comparable online knowledge platforms, so as to reflect how the intended users think and work with tools. Hosted on the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance (SuSanA) website and featuring an AI-powered chatbot to support intuitive natural language exploration of its content, the Toolbox is designed to grow over time as new resources are added and as contributions from the broader community of practice expand its reach. This brief describes the participatory process that shaped the Toolbox's design, the insights it generated, and how those insights were translated into the platform that was launched in 2025. The Toolbox is available at https://rrtoolbox.susana.org/en.