Green Inspiration, A Mitchell Island-based company committed to recycling clothes, announced last week that it has made all its collection bins across the Lower Mainland safer in order to prevent those trying to enter them being trapped.
“We have a responsibility to improve our bins and to make it as safe and convenient as possible for the community to get rid of their unneeded clothes,” Pavel Lalev, Green Inspiration’s administrative and development manager, told the Richmond News.
The company started its search for effective ways to make the containers safer, following a series of incidents across the Lower Mainland that included people getting stuck inside collection bins.
In 2015, one of the company’s bins was involved in a fatal incident, when a woman became trapped inside a bin at a Pit Meadows collection site.
“We now work with a California manufacture (Securr) to adapt all 110 of our bins with a new mechanism to make sure nobody can climb into or get trapped in the bins,” said Lalev.
The new mechanism includes using a secondary baffle on the collection bin’s loading tray.
Lalev said the design change is so effective that the City of Delta approved it last month and allow the company to put their bins back on their sites.
The City of Delta had previously banned all collection bins operating in that city in response to the potential dangers they represented. Richmond, however, only banned the ones deemed unsafe and that didn’t include any from Green Inspiration.
“We will be working on improving the design we have now,” said Lalev.
