Before there was LESS, before Magna Clip™, and before there were plans for prototypes or community testing, there was simply a problem I kept noticing.

Around bin day, there seemed to be more litter on the streets.

Sometimes bins were overfilled or their lids had been left open. On windy or rainy days, loose rubbish could quickly move beyond the nature strip and down the street, where it could eventually make its way towards stormwater drains and waterways.

Then there were the birds.

I started noticing cockatoos and other birds opening wheelie-bin lids, pulling at rubbish and scattering it around. Sometimes an already-open bin simply gave them easier access.

Once I started paying attention to it, it became difficult not to notice.

And it wasn’t just something happening around me.

In 2023, ABC News reported that Campbelltown City Council in Sydney was trialling bin-lid devices after cockatoos and strong winds repeatedly caused rubbish to spill from household bins. The council wanted to test whether keeping lids secured could reduce waste spillage while still allowing bins to be emptied normally by collection trucks. (ABC News)

Read the ABC News story

For me, seeing examples like this reinforced something important: this wasn’t necessarily one dramatic environmental problem. It was a small, ordinary problem happening again and again.

And those small problems add up.

A piece of rubbish escaping a bin may not seem significant on its own. But multiply that across streets, suburbs and countless bin days, add wind, rain, wildlife and overflowing bins, and suddenly a simple household object can become one small point where waste escapes into the wider environment.

That was where the thinking behind LESS really began.

Not with the idea that one invention could change the world, but with a much simpler question:

Could one everyday problem be improved with a thoughtful, practical solution?

That question eventually led to the idea behind Magna Clip™.

But the problem came first.

And that is where this story begins.

What’s next

The next chapter follows the shift from noticing the problem to asking what a better solution might actually look like — and how that idea began becoming Magna Clip™.