Some problems look simple until you try to solve them properly.
A waste bag. It holds rubbish. It gets collected. It gets processed. How hard can it be?
For the municipal government of Eindhoven, Netherlands, the answer turned out to be: harder than anyone expected — and the consequences of getting it wrong were visible on the streets every collection day.
This is the story of what a genuinely rigorous UX Evaluation looks like, from first brief to final product. Nine months. More than 20 products tested. One specification that most of the market couldn't meet. And a result that surprised even the client.
The Brief: A Product That Had to Work in the Real World
Eindhoven's municipal government distributes eco-friendly waste bags to local residents as part of its public cleanliness and environmental programme. The bags are collected on a regular cycle — thrown into collection vehicles, compressed under mechanical pressure, transported across the city, and sorted again at transfer stations.
The bags in use were failing that cycle. Punctures during handling. Tears under compression. Waste scattered across collection routes and sorting floors. For the sanitation teams, it was a daily operational burden. For the city, it was a public cleanliness problem that undermined the programme's purpose.
The requirement: a high-strength, drawstring waste bag capable of withstanding the full mechanical stress of municipal collection — at a cost compatible with public procurement at scale.
That specification sounds straightforward. It wasn't.
Why Standard Evaluation Wasn't Enough
The instinctive response to a product performance problem is to find a better product. Browse suppliers. Request samples. Compare specifications on paper. Select the best option available.
Our approach to this engagement was different from the start — because the problem wasn't a lack of options. It was a lack of validated performance data under real operating conditions.
Supplier specifications describe what a product is designed to do. UX Evaluation determines what it actually does — in the hands of the people who use it, under the conditions they use it in, across the full operational cycle it needs to survive.
For a municipal waste bag, that distinction matters enormously. A bag that performs adequately in a controlled drop test may fail completely when it's thrown into a compaction vehicle at 6am by a sanitation worker running a tight collection schedule. The test environment has to match the use environment. Otherwise the evaluation is measuring the wrong thing.
The Evaluation: Built Around the Actual Use Case
We designed the UX Evaluation framework for this engagement from the operational reality outward — starting with a detailed mapping of every stress point in Eindhoven's collection cycle, and working backward to define what a product would need to demonstrate at each stage.
The testing protocol covered five performance dimensions:
- Tensile strength — resistance to tearing under the lateral and vertical loads of mechanical handling
- Puncture resistance — integrity under sharp object contact during compaction and sorting
- Compression integrity — bag structure retention under high-pressure compaction in collection vehicles
- Seal and drawstring durability — closure performance through a full simulated collection cycle
- Batch consistency — quality stability across production runs, not just sample units
Over nine months, more than 20 distinct products were evaluated against this framework. Each failure was documented with precision: what failed, at which stage, under what conditions, and why. That documentation fed directly back into the specification — progressively tightening the criteria as the evaluation revealed where the real performance gaps were.
This is what separates UX Evaluation from product selection. Product selection finds the best available option. UX Evaluation defines what the right option actually needs to be — and keeps testing until it finds one that meets that standard, or concludes that the market can't provide it.
Most of the 20+ products tested didn't survive the first two rounds.
The Finding: A Material the Market Hadn't Offered
After nine months of structured evaluation, one product category met the full specification: high-strength nylon co-extruded film (PEPA) — a composite construction that combines polyethylene flexibility with nylon tensile and puncture resistance, unified into a single co-extruded film.
The performance data was not ambiguous. The PEPA bag demonstrated pressure tolerance 50 times greater than standard reinforced waste bags across compression, puncture, and tensile testing. Drawstring integrity held through full-cycle simulation. Seal performance exceeded specification under every test condition.
This wasn't a marginal improvement. It was a product operating in a fundamentally different performance category — one that the initial supplier landscape hadn't surfaced, and that only became visible through the depth of the evaluation process.
Validation: What the People Who Use It Said
Technical performance data tells one part of the story. The other part belongs to the people who actually use the product in the field.
Our UX Evaluation included operational validation with Eindhoven's sanitation teams — the workers who manage the collection routes, handle the bags under real conditions, and live with the consequences of product failure every working day.
Their response was direct:
“This bag maintains excellent integrity even under high pressure. It makes our work significantly easier.”
— Sanitation worker, Eindhoven municipal collection team
The municipal client's assessment was equally unambiguous:
“We have never seen a waste bag this strong.”
— Eindhoven municipal government
For a product category where performance expectations had been shaped by decades of standard procurement, that reaction is a precise measure of how much the evaluation process had moved the outcome beyond what conventional sourcing would have found.
The Result: 800,000 Units. Phase One.
The Eindhoven municipal government placed an initial order of over 800,000 units as the first phase of a proof-of-concept rollout across the city's residential waste collection network.
The scale of that commitment reflects the confidence that nine months of rigorous evaluation had earned. This wasn't a trial order placed on the basis of a promising sample. It was a procurement decision grounded in validated performance data, operational feedback, and a testing process that had already stress-tested the product against every failure mode the collection cycle could produce.
The risk had been front-loaded into the evaluation. By the time the purchase order was placed, there were no unknowns left to manage.
What This Case Says About UX Evaluation
The Eindhoven engagement illustrates something we believe is true across every product category and every client context: the value of UX Evaluation is not in finding products. It's in defining what the right product actually needs to be — and refusing to stop until the evaluation either finds it or proves it doesn't exist.
That process takes longer than conventional product selection. It requires a testing framework built around the real use case, not the supplier's specification sheet. It requires the discipline to document failures precisely and use them to sharpen the criteria. And it requires the willingness to tell a client that most of what the market offers isn't good enough — and keep looking.
Nine months. Twenty-plus products. One that worked.
That's what rigorous UX Evaluation looks like in practice.
CommBriX designs and executes custom UX Evaluation programmes for public sector and enterprise clients across Europe — from initial specification design through operational validation and procurement support.