UBCO students bringing life-saving retrofits to donation bins

Clothing donation bins should start moving back to Canadian streets now that UBC Okanagan engineering students have found ways to make them safer.

Dozens of bins were pulled off city streets after a number of people in Vancouver died while inside the bins. The Big Brothers and Sisters organization alone has pulled 180 bins and expects to lose half-a-million dollars in donations.

UBCO School of Engineering instructor Ray Taheri saw the problem as a challenge and directed his first-year design course students to find a way to retrofit existing bins.

“Most engineers know that modifying an existing design is often more difficult than starting from scratch,” Taheri said in a news release. “It was a perfect challenge for my students.”

At the same time, other students looked into the social side of the issue and found, for example, that most deaths happened within a few hundred metres of homeless shelters and happened between midnight and 6 a.m.

They looked at having timed locks and putting sensors on the bins to measure how full they are.

In the end, they came up with four prototypes and are now working with Big Brothers on plans to start retrofitting their bins over the next few months.

To contact a reporter for this story, email Rob Munro or call 250-808-0143 or email the editor. You can also submitphotos, videos or news tips to the newsroom and be entered to win a monthly prize draw.

We welcome your comments and opinions on our stories but play nice. We won't censor or delete comments unless they contain off-topic statements or links, unnecessary vulgarity, false facts, spam or obviously fake profiles. If you have any concerns about what you see in comments, email the editor in the link above.