'Trash talking' initiatives in Cambrian College aim to promote recycling, reduce waste

Cambrian College in Sudbury is hoping two new additions to the cafeteria will promote a more environmentally sustainable campus while educating and engaging with students.

The first, OscarSort, is a talking trash sorting system that scans for disposable items and tells users where it goes, eliminating the guesswork.

Sic Sox bins are used to collect things like clothing, bedding, towels, pillows, gently used shoes, handbags, stuffed animals and more. Once full of textiles, they will be shipped for processing to the Indigenous-led company headquarters in Brunswick House First Nation near Chapleau. (Lyndsay Aelick/CTV News)

Janneke Nicholls, Cambrian’s vice-president of finance, administration and applied research, said many people don't know which waste products go where.

"I’ll give you an example of myself -- I thought paper towel was recyclable, but it's actually compostable," Nicholls said.

"We have lots of … international students and we have people that come from different areas in Canada, and different items can be recycled in different areas. So this sort of helps people."

Fourth-year nursing student Rhoda Champagne said OscarSort will help students make the right choices.

"I think we're probably all a little bit guilty of that -- we kind of just walk by and throw something in," Champagne said.

OscarSort is a talking trash sorting system that scans for disposable items and tells users where it goes, eliminating the guesswork. (Lyndsay Aelick/CTV News)

"We don't really have the time to read or we're just kind of moving fast but I mean, you just hold it. It's actually kind of fun. So it will probably draw people and it'll just tell you where to put it. So I think it will definitely help things."

On the other side of the cafeteria are Sic Sox bins, which are used to collect things like clothing, bedding, towels, pillows, gently used shoes, handbags, stuffed animals and more.

Once full of textiles, they will be shipped for processing to the Indigenous-led company headquarters in Brunswick House First Nation near Chapleau.

"OscarSort and SicSox are two great ways to help us reduce our carbon footprint here on campus and find easy and simple ways so we can all start making a larger collective impact on our environment," added Nicholls.

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Gently used donations will be cleaned and resold online, while the remaining material will be shredded to break the textiles down and hopefully turned into housing insulation.

The measures are part of Cambrian’s strategic priority to promote a more environmentally sustainable campus with a smaller carbon footprint while advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development goals.

"The sustainability committee has been actually very, very busy over this last year with multiple initiatives," Nicholls said.

"We've talked about the carpooling, and we've also talked about the bike repair, but now we're focused on waste."

She said the school produces 360 tonnes of waste per year, so the goal is to see at least a 10 per cent reduction in that number in the next year.