UBC donation bin design task force on hold because no one will fund it

WEST VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) — A task force to design safer donation bins out of UBC Okanagan is on hold because no one has come forward to financially back the program.

It’s been more than a month since a clothing donation bin death in West Vancouver sparked interest in a task force looking to make the containers safer, but it seems like the momentum is slowing down.

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Ray Tahari, an engineering professor at UBC Okanagan, says his students have developed a number of designs to retrofit existing bins, making them less deadly. However, despite a lot of earlier interest in working with them, no one is following through to put money toward pushing the program ahead, even though they already have designs to retrofit bins developed.

That’s surprising, he says, because a lot of organizations expressed interest in working with groups on bin designs earlier this month after a man died at the end of December after he became stuck inside a clothing donation bin.

“All these small and larger profit and non-profit organizations, they all say it’s very good and let’s do it, but I haven’t even seen a cheque coming through,” he says.

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He says the task force needs about $110,000 to pay students and develop and test prototypes, adding that designs revolve around retrofitting exisiting bins, which would be cheaper than replacing them.

“We make them more difficult to get in, that’s number one. Number two, we can have artificial intelligence mechanism that detects from inside that something is moving, that is not a donation bag, and right away it can dispatch police,” he says.

“The goal for this task force is not to completely redesign from scratch — that takes a longer time and tens of millions of dollars to replace these thousands of bins.”

He says the retrofitting process is meant to happen on the spot instead of moving bins to another location.

He says there is an urgency to fix the bins. He formed a task force including students, a clinician, forensic pathologist, and a social studies professor who studies homelessness.

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He says the money would go toward paying the students, materials, testing, lab supplies and other items. He says he gave them to non-profit and profit organizations that benefit from donation bins.

“Everything gets excited, and then after a while, everything goes back to normal,” he says. “I’m afraid that people are losing their momentum.

“The problem with the donation bins is cities can order to ban them and remove them — this is the easiest way to do it — it costs owners millions of dollars, but the problem with this decision is there is a cascade of other problems.”

– With files from Taran Parmar

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