Climate & Sustainability
Meet Oscar, UCSC’s new waste sorting assistant
UCSC has installed Oscar Sort, an artificial intelligence-powered waste assistant, to help the campus community properly sort their daily landfill, recycling, and compost.
Positioned in the front hallway of McHenry Library, Oscar uses a display screen and real-time visual recognition to guide users on where to place their items across three primary streams: landfill, recycling, and compost.
In an innovative step toward its sustainability goals, UCSC has installed Oscar Sort, an artificial intelligence-powered waste assistant, to help the campus community properly sort their daily landfill, recycling, and compost. This rollout is facilitated by a contribution from Pepsi.
With approximately 5,000 new students arriving at UCSC each year, many coming from different cities and countries with vastly different waste-sorting rules, navigating campus waste bins can be very confusing. This confusion often leads to high contamination rates across landfill, recycling, and compost streams. For example, in a recent waste audit conducted at McHenry Library, the landfill bins were found to have a contamination rate of 42%. In other words, over 40% of the materials found in the landfill bins could have been diverted to the recycling or compost bins instead.
Oscar Sort aims to change that. Positioned in the front hallway of McHenry Library, Oscar uses a display screen and real-time visual recognition to guide users on where to place their items across three primary streams: landfill, recycling, and compost. “Oscar takes the guesswork out of waste sorting. By helping our community make the right choice at the bin, we can dramatically increase our recycling and composting rates across campus.” Said Lumpy Ervin, Sr. Superintendent Custodial and Zero Waste Action Committee Co-Chair.
Increasing recycling and composting is important. For example, recycling one aluminum can uses 95% less energy than creating an aluminum can from scratch, equivalent to the amount of energy needed to power a laptop for nearly four hours. After a few months of installation, Oscar will be able to share if Banana Slugs at McHenry Library have improved their waste sorting habits and diversion rates. Some locations currently using Oscar have seen a 65% increase in their waste diversion rate. Even a small percentage increase in UCSC’s diversion rate would significantly reduce landfill waste and greenhouse gas emissions.
Targeted Sorting & Additional Campus Resources
Oscar Sort is designed to assist with the most common everyday disposal items – such as coffee cups, food containers, beverage bottles, and snack packaging – where quick sorting decisions happen on the go.
For specialized, unique, or bulky items (such as e-waste, batteries, or oversized packaging), campus community members are encouraged to check UCSC’s Recycle Coach website or mobile app. Recycle Coach serves as the university’s comprehensive “What Goes Where” search engine for all non-standard waste streams.
Help “Train” Oscar
Like any smart assistant, Oscar gets better with experience. The Custodial and Sustainability Departments are asking early users, staff, and summer visitors to actively participate in fine-tuning Oscar’s accuracy before the full student body returns for the fall term.
If Oscar misidentifies an item, users can scan the on-screen QR code to submit quick feedback. This real-time reporting allows UCSC’s team to adjust campus-specific items faster, ensuring Oscar is as “dialed in” as possible for the start of the academic year.
AI For Sustainability – Really?
There are understandably many concerns about the water and energy usage associated with generative AI. Instead of generative AI, Oscar Sort uses Edge AI, which processes images on local physical devices instead of cloud-based data centers. This drastically cuts down the amount of energy needed for Oscar to function, and Oscar has proven to save tons of carbon emissions through increasing diversion rates and educating participants to recycle right moving forward.
Furthermore, Oscar does not collect or store any personal data. Its algorithms are designed to completely obscure a person’s face when they are using the device and blur out every other part of the frame except the area around a waste item.
Happy Sorting!
Properly diverting waste from the landfill protects our local land, water, and air. We hope that next time you wonder where your chip wrapper or coffee cup goes, Oscar Sort can show you the way.