Fourth B.C. death prompts plea for donation bin recall
Hundreds of clothing donation bins across Metro Vancouver should be recalled and redesigned after the fourth recent bin-related death in B.C., says Nicole Mucci of the Union Gospel Mission.
“If this was a child’s toy or any other kind of product that was consumed by the general population, and not our most vulnerable population, it absolutely would be recalled until the product was re-examined and redesigned and redistributed,” said Mucci.
“It’s devastating to think that four people have lost their lives in B.C. over the past few years due to the structural design and crawling in, in their desperate moments. It’s time to just pull these bins off the streets until they can re-equip them.”
Mucci was reacting to news that a 34-year-old Vancouver man
died late Sunday night, or early Monday morning, after becoming trapped in the access point of a Community Living Society bin in Ambleside Park in West Vancouver.
The openings are designed to close after the donation has been placed inside the bin, but they can be deadly if someone positions themselves partway in the opening to reach in and grab clothes and the mechanism traps them.
Donna Powers, the communication director for the District of West Vancouver, said the district would look at the ramifications to charities of having bins removed or made more secure.
“While the path forward is still to be made clear, one death is one too many, and the district is committed to making the necessary changes to ensure this does not happen again,” Powers said.
In July 2018, a woman died in a Developmental Disabilities Association bin at the West Point Grey Community Centre in Vancouver; in March 2016, a 20-year-old man died in a clothing bin in Surrey, and in September 2015 a woman died in a bin in Pitt Meadows. One man died in a bin in Ontario last month, while another died in Calgary in 2017. There have also been deaths across the United States and around the world.
Mucci said Union Gospel Mission does not use clothing-disposal bins to raise money or re-distribute clothing. She said that some charities clean the clothes and distribute them to people in need, while others sell the clothes to textile recyclers and use that money for their organization.
“They are still giving back to the community, but in a different way,” she said, adding there are hundreds of these bins throughout Metro Vancouver.
Since the July 2018 fatality, Mucci has been in contact with Ray Taheri, a UBC Okanagan campus engineering lecturer whose students are striving to come up with a safe clothing bin design. Taheri was upset to learn of yet another fatality.
“It’s so sad that something so beautiful turns into something so tragic,” he said, referring to the death.
Taheri said he will reach out to Mucci and hopes to fast-track his first-year students’ designs and pass their work on to fourth-year students for development to manufacturing stage. “I think I need to rush this further. I’m sure this happens all over and we are looking for a global solution,” Taheri said.
He said there would be problems with a total recall of the hundreds of bins in Metro Vancouver, including where to store them and co-ordinating the charities that rely on the income from the bins.
According to the latest government information, the Community Living Society had annual revenues of $27.4 million, with the bulk of that coming from the three levels of government, suggesting the bin revenue is only a small component.
Taheri said it would be better to come up with a temporary fix, and then retrofit the bins where they are, noting that is a “band-aid solution to a bleeding problem.”
The B.C. Coroners Service is investigating the latest tragedy, said Andy Watson, a spokesman for the service. The Coroners Service investigates all “sudden, unexpected and unnatural deaths” in the province and makes recommendations intended to prevent deaths in similar circumstances, he said. With this latest fatality, the service is now examining the clothing bin-related deaths of five people since 2015.
Many charities use donation bins as a way to bring in goods. But they are not the only option available to people looking to give.
There are staffed drop-off points around the region and pickup programs that accept items from those who want to help raise funds that benefit hospitals, homeless youth, marginalized women, and mentoring programs for children, among other things.