Students in our SD 281: Sustainable Communities, Sustainable World course worked with the City of Vancouver (COV) and CityStudio to look at urban sustainability through the lens of garbage on the street.  Their innovative, self-designed projects included:

- Awareness - how to support more effective waste streaming in public spaces

- Root causes of litter - comparing Vancouver and Surrey from socio-economic perspectives

- Engaging the public - proposing an app that the public can use to stream their garbage and let the city know when an area needs to be cleaned up

- Engaging university students - what motivates young people to get involved with their city to improve waste management

- Public composting - moving toward composting in public spaces

- Social inclusion - working with social enterprises that employ marginalized / hard-to-employ citizens in waste management

- Cleanliness Index - field-testing and recommending improvements for a tool that the COV is developing to measure and track street waste

(Photo:  SD 281 class with staff from the COV and CityStudio after the final project presentations)