{"id":30251,"date":"2021-11-04T14:11:42","date_gmt":"2021-11-04T18:11:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=30251"},"modified":"2021-11-04T14:13:41","modified_gmt":"2021-11-04T18:13:41","slug":"local-students-designing-an-app-to-promote-circular-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/local-students-designing-an-app-to-promote-circular-economy\/","title":{"rendered":"Local students designing an app to promote circular economy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

To mark Canadian Waste Reduction Week, the winners of the FLL Canada Cup from \u00c9cole \u00e9l\u00e9mentaire catholique Saint-Jean introduced their new innovation project as part of this year\u2019s First Lego League Challenge Program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The team, \u00c9quipe Francobotique, which consisted of students from Grades Four to Seven, hosted a public survey last Saturday with help from the Town of Aurora.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last year, the students came up with the COVID BUSTER program and this year it is the Waste Buster program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The theme of this project is the transportation of packages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe students looked at this and instead of making transportation more efficient, they actually wanted to look at reducing the amount that we are consuming,\u201d said Ren\u00e9e Northrup, head coach and teacher at \u00c9cole secondaire catholique Renaissance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI 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,\u201d said Grade Seven student Luke Deplaedt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI found that a lot of people are happy with what we are doing. They\u2019re all saying we have things that can be reused but we don\u2019t know where to put them. We just throw them out because there\u2019s nowhere else to put them,\u201d said Grade 7 student Suzanne Northrup.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf we want to survive, we need to recycle more. The Earth is getting polluted by garbage. If we don\u2019t do this we won\u2019t survive,\u201d said Grade Six student, Danielle Northrup.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The students then researched if there are apps out there to help people recycle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ren\u00e9e Northrup said students found a lot of recycling and waste apps available for cell phones, but what they didn\u2019t find is any of them promoting circular economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most guide citizens towards landfills and recycling centres.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA 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,\u201d said Ren\u00e9e.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe 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,\u201d said Grade Seven student Kaiah Sanderson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Added Grade 4 student Madeline Northrup: \u201cWe searched it up and we found circular economy. We looked even more but there wasn\u2019t very much there. There was only recycling and linear economy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019re hoping for a pretty big impact because this is important to us and we hope a lot of people are interested,\u201d said Grade Seven student Claire McWhinnie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Christmas, the students hope to have this app up and running.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It will be free of charge on app stores.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The students also hope that someone professional comes around and takes this app further.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It would be their dream come true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Robert Belardi<\/strong><\/p>\n\r\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To mark Canadian Waste Reduction Week, the winners of the FLL Canada Cup from \u00c9cole \u00e9l\u00e9mentaire catholique Saint-Jean introduced their new innovation project as part of this year\u2019s First Lego League Challenge Program. The team, \u00c9quipe Francobotique, which consisted of students from Grades Four to Seven, hosted a public survey last Saturday with help from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":30230,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/2021-11-04-02.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-7RV","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-16 01:44:50","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30251\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}