Clean Up Your Recycling Game
Our Clean Recycling Pilot aims to help apartment residents improve their waste and recycling habits
By Emily Kildow, Associate Director, Sustainability, Sidewalk Labs
Cities around the world are leading an ambitious push to eliminate GHG emissions. Toronto has made tremendous strides on this front, targeting a 65 percent reduction by 2030. As part of that goal, the city is aiming to divert 70 percent of recyclables and organics from landfill by 2026.
But there’s a way to go. Today, almost half of Toronto residents live in apartments, condos, and co-ops — and they recycle and compost only 28 percent of their waste.
Why? For one, recycling is hard: we mis-categorize paper and plastic, we inadvertently contaminate recycling with food, we “wish cycle” (or try to recycle things we should throw away). These are perfectly understandable mistakes.
But we have a hypothesis: if you provide people with easy-to-understand information about their waste sorting behaviour, then they’ll improve their recycling game — helping their city reduce emissions by keeping valuable materials out of landfills. To test our hypothesis, starting today, we are launching a pilot with a Toronto apartment building.
What will the pilot study?
The Clean Recycling Pilot is studying how well building residents respond to feedback about their building’s waste sorting behaviour, with the goal of helping people to (1) recognize the complicated do’s and don’t’s of correct sorting and (2) ultimately improve their recycling practices. Residents of a Toronto apartment building receive biweekly feedback and tips about how to improve recycling habits, over a course of three months. Feedback on recycling is shared through email, an online portal, and signage throughout the building.
Who’s involved?
The Clean Recycling Pilot is a partnership between Sidewalk Labs, Canada Fibers (a materials recovery facility), AMP Robotics, and a building developer in Toronto. To respect the privacy of residents, we are not sharing the name or location of the building or its developer. There is also the option for residents to opt out of the pilot.
How does it work?
Building waste is collected by a hauler and brought to the Canada Fibers materials recovery facility. The waste is placed along a conveyor belt, where an employee manually sorts, categorizes, and records waste type and weights. Sidewalk Labs has also installed an AMP Robotics computer vision system on the conveyor belt to identify materials and contamination.
The pilot conforms to the protocol used by the City of Toronto for its existing waste characterization studies, with the goal of ensuring that no waste could be identifiable to an individual. It has also undergone Sidewalk Labs’ Responsible Data Use Assessment (RDUA) process. The full list of risk mitigation efforts, including the ability to opt-out, can be found in our RDUA summary.
The non-personal, aggregate data about the waste recorded by the materials recovery facility and AMP will be shared with Sidewalk Labs, residents in the buildings, and building owners. Once the pilot is complete, Sidewalk Labs will share a report to the public using the same aggregate and non-identifying data.
When will the pilot run?
The Clean Recycling Pilot will start on January 11, 2020 and run for three months.
