Local students designing an app to promote circular economy

To mark Canadian Waste Reduction Week, the winners of the FLL Canada Cup from École élémentaire catholique Saint-Jean introduced their new innovation project as part of this year's First Lego League Challenge Program.

The team, Équipe Francobotique, which consisted of students from Grades Four to Seven, hosted a public survey last Saturday with help from the Town of Aurora.

As part of the First Lego League Challenge Program, students must challenge a current issue in society and design an innovation project to fix it. This is before the final competition when the students must design a robot out of Lego to complete a series of challenges.

Last year, the students came up with the COVID BUSTER program and this year it is the Waste Buster program.

The theme of this project is the transportation of packages.

“The students looked at this and instead of making transportation more efficient, they actually wanted to look at reducing the amount that we are consuming,” said Renée Northrup, head coach and teacher at École secondaire catholique Renaissance. 

“What they looked at is circular economy. The idea is to reduce what we are consuming first, to reuse and repair, and, as a last resort, recycle. Then landfill if we absolutely have to.”

Last weekend, at 229 Industrial Parkway N in Aurora, the students hosted an official event as part of Waste Reduction Week and invited citizens from the Town to drive through the parking lot to answer survey questions from the students regarding this issue.

“I found that a lot of the elder population knew a lot more about circular economy than the younger population. The majority of people who responded said they did not know about circular economy. It shows how much we need to educate people on this,” said Grade Seven student Luke Deplaedt.

“I found that a lot of people are happy with what we are doing. They're all saying we have things that can be reused but we don't know where to put them. We just throw them out because there's nowhere else to put them,” said Grade 7 student Suzanne Northrup.

“If we want to survive, we need to recycle more. The Earth is getting polluted by garbage. If we don't do this we won't survive,” said Grade Six student, Danielle Northrup.

In piecing together this app, which will be available for iPhone and Android use, the students visited the Elgin Mills Community Environmental Centre and spoke with a UPS driver to get a better idea.

An employee at Elgin Mills said he is appalled on a daily basis when he sees what goes to waste. A UPS driver said workers often get injured on the job because there are so many packages to deliver.

The students then researched if there are apps out there to help people recycle.

Renée Northrup said students found a lot of recycling and waste apps available for cell phones, but what they didn't find is any of them promoting circular economy.

Most guide citizens towards landfills and recycling centres.

“A prototype is programmed already and they have over 100 circular solutions in the database that they have researched and found. Those are solutions for businesses and depots and donation centres within York Region,” said Renée.

“We realized how much people consume nowadays, the amount of packages and the amount of garbage that goes to waste. We decided to fix this problem and put an app together,” said Grade Seven student Kaiah Sanderson.

Added Grade 4 student Madeline Northrup: “We searched it up and we found circular economy. We looked even more but there wasn't very much there. There was only recycling and linear economy.”

When further asked why an app would be successful, the students said they believe designing an app is the best method to inform people about all of this.

“We're hoping for a pretty big impact because this is important to us and we hope a lot of people are interested,” said Grade Seven student Claire McWhinnie.

By Christmas, the students hope to have this app up and running.

It will be free of charge on app stores.

The students also hope that someone professional comes around and takes this app further.

It would be their dream come true.

By Robert Belardi