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How we designed and equipped producers for Singapore's Beverage Container Return Scheme (BCRS)
Brain Juice Collective (BJC), engaged through GLOO, designed and facilitated a community training programme for Singapore’s Beverage Container Return Scheme (BCRS) to prepare producers for the Scheme’s launch. Across six virtual sessions held between November 2025 and February 2026, BJC reached 382 registered participants (250 live attendees, 65.4% attendance), addressed clear pre-existing knowledge gaps, and fielded 210 producer questions across 17 categories. The project’s defining strength was BJC’s adaptability: training content evolved continuously, and BJC absorbed each revision without disrupting delivery quality.
The mission
As climate change and pollution become more pressing public concerns, both the public and private sectors are accelerating their push toward sustainability. Singapore’s Beverage Container Return Scheme (BCRS) is a national initiative designed to lift recycling rates, reduce waste, and shift consumer habits toward more sustainable practices. As a producer-led scheme, its successful rollout depended on ensuring that beverage producers and community partners fully understood their responsibilities — from container collection through to end-of-life management.
The core challenge was equipping these stakeholders with the knowledge and confidence to participate in the Scheme effectively ahead of its launch.
The Brain Juice Approach
Brain Juice Collective (BJC) was engaged by BCRS via GLOO, an independent Singaporean agency, to design and facilitate a structured community training programme. The brief encompassed attending BCRS briefings to absorb source material, designing a one-hour workshop with built-in engagement mechanics such as trivia quizzes, and developing pre- and post-session surveys to measure participant understanding. BJC then facilitated six virtual training sessions of up to 100 participants each, led by a facilitator and supported by technical staff, with a session summary and key insights delivered to BCRS after every run.
The BJC Shift
Rather than positioning ourselves as a facilitation vendor, we took an immersive approach from day one. BJC attended BCRS’s internal meetings and orientation sessions to absorb the source material directly, ensuring that what we designed and delivered was grounded in a nuanced, accurate understanding of the Scheme rather than a surface-level brief.
From there, we translated our learnings into a structured yet accessible one-hour workshop, layered with engagement mechanics such as trivia to keep a large virtual audience active and invested throughout. Knowing that producers would arrive with varying levels of familiarity with BCRS, we deliberately designed the session to be interactive rather than purely informational.
When updates to the training material were issued midway through the programme, we adapted quickly and without disruption. We took the time to properly understand each revision, refreshed the content accordingly, and ensured every remaining session reflected the most current and accurate guidance — a clear demonstration of our commitment to getting it right rather than simply getting it done.
Our Role
What We Did
BJC delivered the project across two integrated workstreams:
Community Training Design. We attended BCRS briefings to absorb the source material, designed a one-hour workshop complete with engagement mechanics such as trivia, and developed pre- and post-session surveys to measure participant understanding. This groundwork ensured the training was accurate, accessible, and tailored to a large and varied producer audience.
Community Training Facilitation. We delivered six virtual sessions of up to 100 participants each, at a cadence of roughly two sessions per month. Every session was run by a lead facilitator supported by a dedicated technical assistant, with a summary and key insights compiled and shared with BCRS after each run. This structure ensured consistent delivery while giving BCRS a clear, ongoing read on how producers were responding to the training.
Together, these two workstreams ensured that BCRS’s producer community was not only informed about the programme but genuinely equipped and engaged to participate in it.
On Our RADAr: Framework Application
BJC’s RADAr framework — a Responsible Innovation lens drawing on Owen et al. (2013) and Greenhalgh et al. (2023) — invites teams to design and deliver work through four dimensions: Reflect, Anticipate, Diversify, and Adapt & Respond. Looking back at the BCRS community training programme, each dimension is visible not as a tick-box but as a mode of working that shaped real decisions on the ground.
Reflect
Look within.
• Attended BCRS internal meetings and orientation sessions to absorb the source material first-hand, rather than relying on a brief.
• Built pre- and post-session surveys into the programme so each run produced a measurable read on understanding and confidence.
• Compiled a session summary and key insights after every run, creating a continuous loop of self-evaluation alongside BCRS.
• Anastacia’s closing reflection demonstrates the discipline of reviewing not just what was delivered, but how the team showed up under change.
Anticipate
Things go wrong.
• Designed the workshop to be interactive rather than purely informational, anticipating that producers would arrive with very different levels of BCRS familiarity.
• Used pre-survey data to surface the most pressing concerns — portal usage, barcodes and labelling, fee structures — so each session pre-empted them.
• Staffed every session with both a lead facilitator and a dedicated technical assistant to absorb live tech or platform issues without derailing delivery.
• Tracked questions across 17 categories to detect industry-wide gaps early and flag them to BCRS as systemic, not incidental.
Diversify
We’re all in this together.
• Reached 382 registered participants spanning management, administration, QA, and specialist functions across the F&B and distribution sector.
• Engaged Managers and Directors alongside operational staff, ensuring BCRS compliance was understood across decision-making layers, not siloed.
• Documented every question and answer in shared summaries, giving BCRS a multi-voice record of producer sentiment rather than a single perspective.
• Recommended bringing vocal participants into future campaign co-creation — widening the design loop beyond the agency-client pair.
Adapt & Respond
Nothing goes as planned.
• Absorbed continuous updates to the training material across the programme without disrupting session quality or cadence.
• Refreshed content for every remaining session whenever revisions were issued, prioritising accuracy over convenience.
• Translated post-session insights into forward recommendations — drop-in barcode clinics, a living FAQ, an upgraded QR-linked self-serve resource — so the programme kept evolving with the audience.
• Treated the Cheat Sheet feedback as a signal to deepen, not just repeat, future support.
Taken together, these four moves explain why the project landed the way it did. Reflect and Anticipate kept the design grounded in what producers actually needed; Diversify ensured the programme spoke across an audience that ranged from Directors to specialists; and Adapt & Respond — the dimension Anastacia points to in her reflection — is what allowed BJC to hold quality steady while the underlying material kept moving. RADAr, in this engagement, was less a framework laid over the work and more an honest description of how the work was done.
Our impact
Ripples & Results
Reach
Across six sessions held between November 2025 and February 2026, the programme drew 382 registered participants and 250 live attendees, yielding an overall attendance rate of 65.4%. Session 1 saw the strongest turnout at 80.5%, reflecting high initial interest from the producer community ahead of the Scheme’s launch. Attendance gradually softened in later sessions, reaching its lowest at Session 6 (46.7%) — a common pattern in multi-session programmes, and one that may also indicate producers increasingly felt equipped to self-navigate available resources as the programme progressed.
The respondent profile revealed strong leadership engagement: Managers and Directors made up the majority of participants, signalling that BCRS compliance was being treated as a strategic business priority rather than an operational afterthought. Participants spanned management, administration, QA, and specialist functions across the F&B and distribution sector.
Relevance
Pre-survey data confirmed that the training was reaching an audience that genuinely needed it. Participants entered with an average BCRS familiarity score of 2.8 out of 5, with 65.7% rating themselves at 3 or below. Confidence in using the BCRS portal was similarly low, with 41.9% reporting little to no confidence ahead of their session. The pre-survey also surfaced the most pressing concerns — portal usage and product registration, barcodes and labelling, and fee structures consistently topped the list — allowing BJC to ensure every session addressed the questions producers most needed answered.
Reception
Participants were actively engaged throughout, submitting 210 questions across the six sessions and spanning 17 distinct categories. The most recurring themes — barcode and GS1 requirements, end-to-end process flow, and sticker and labelling rules — appeared in nearly every session, confirming these as genuine industry-wide knowledge gaps rather than one-off queries. BJC documented every question and answer in post-session summaries shared with BCRS, creating an ongoing record of producer sentiment and outstanding concerns.
Qualitative feedback reinforced what the engagement data already suggested. Participants singled out the Cheat Sheet as a particularly useful takeaway, and post-session responses surfaced a clear appetite for more hands-on, applied support — a strong signal that producers wanted to go deeper rather than disengage. That insight directly shaped BJC’s recommendations for follow-up drop-in clinic sessions and an upgraded, QR-linked self-serve resource.
Beyond the Sessions
The programme’s impact extended well beyond attendance numbers. BJC’s detailed impact reporting gave BCRS a clear, data-driven picture of how the producer community was absorbing the Scheme — what they understood, what confused them, and where additional support was needed. The recommendations surfaced through this work — including dedicated barcode clinics, a living FAQ document, and the involvement of vocal participants in future campaign co-creation — provided BCRS with a practical roadmap for strengthening producer engagement going forward.
Reflections
“The biggest takeaway from this project was the importance of staying adaptable in the face of change. What stood out most was how frequently the training material evolved, with updates coming in across almost every session rather than as a single, manageable revision. It would have been easy to feel destabilised by that, but it ultimately reinforced something worth being proud of: BJC’s ability to absorb changes quickly, reorient, and continue delivering sessions with confidence and accuracy.
That flexibility, more than any single deliverable, felt like the truest demonstration of what BJC brings to a project. It is one thing to design a solid programme in a controlled environment; it is another to maintain quality and composure when the ground keeps shifting beneath you. This project was a good reminder that adaptability is not just a nice-to-have — in live, evolving programmes like this one, it is the whole game.”
— Anastacia, Senior Portfolio Executive
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