Smart Recycling Bin Designed By Bergen College Students Wins Challenge

PARAMUS, NJ —After a yearlong process, a Bergen Community College student research team has developed an intelligent recycling bin, the ScanCan, that identifies and accepts or rejects recyclable materials. After pitching the idea to a panel of experts and entrepreneurs last week, the students were chosen as the winners of the national 2022 Community College Innovation Challenge, a news release said.

"(The win) is validation that the research operation that we started is something that is creating top-notch students and inventions," Luis De Abreu, one of the team's mentors, told Patch, referring to the college's new student research center, which provided space for workshops and brainstorming sessions for the invention.

The challenge, led by the American Association of Community Colleges, in partnership with the National Science Foundation, encourages students to design innovative solutions that address real-world problems, and this three-student team, made up of two engineering majors and a computer science major, saw the bin as a way to improve recycling rates.

"The ideas presented were incredibly impressive," Walter Bumphus, president and CEO of the American Association of Community Colleges, said in the news release. "The student teams showcased the leadership and ingenuity that is needed to address issues that impact all of us."

Abreu, who is also the STEM program director at Bergen Community College, told Patch he hopes to take his students' ScanCan idea to the next level, by helping them license the right to market and possibly sell the invention to others, all in an effort to "solve a societal problem."

He, the student team and their other mentor, Joseph Sivo, shined a light on the problem, when they interviewed potential customers, as part of the project, to see if the idea was worth pursuing. And what they found was that high-traffic areas, particularly parks, are "rampant" with improper recycling, Sivo said.

"Almost anytime a recycling bin is contaminated, it will become useless and is considered garbage," Sivo, also a physics professor at the college, said, noting that this invention would solve that problem. "There is no reason why great innovative ideas can't come out of a community college, and we have to try to follow through as much as possible in actually turning this into a real product."

As part of the experience last week, the student team, as one of 12 finalists, participated in an innovation boot camp with industry professionals and entrepreneurs; the camp then ended in a poster session, in which students presented their projects.

"The week's events are just one example of the critical role our community colleges play in supporting and educating the next generation of STEM talent. It has been inspiring to see how the participants' hard work and dedication have resulted in some truly impressive projects," Sylvia Butterfield, acting assistant director for NSF's Education and Human Resources Directorate, said in the news release. "Each team represents the future of science and technology in the United States."