This seems to be a uniquely Canadian crisis; European and U. S. donation bins aren’t killing nearly as many people
Her screams alerted help, but it came too late to save the 35-year-old Toronto woman trapped in the chute of a clothing donation box early Tuesday morning.
The woman, identified only as Crystal, was dead by the time firefighters were able to cut her from the League For Human Rights drop box.
The death marks the second time in only eight days that a Canadian has died while apparently trying to remove items from a clothing-donation bin.
It’s the third such Canadian death since November, and at least the seventh since 2015.
With critics referring to the bins as “death traps,” charities and municipalities are taking drastic action to prevent more fatalities.
Diabetes Canada announced last week it is retrofitting all its clothing-donation bins to prevent death or injury in cases of misuse. Inclusion B. C. is removing all 146 of its B. C. bins, despite the expected revenue and job losses. The City of West Vancouver has ordered all its donation bins locked, while Burnaby, B. C., is asking for all bins to be removed from within its city limits.
The rash of clothing bin deaths seems to be uniquely Canadian. A search of news headlines from the past few years found only a handful of instances of bin deaths in Europe and the United States, despite their much larger populations.
An overnight rescue in #SurreyBC – @Local1271 firefighters helped a woman stuck in a clothing donation bin. pic.twitter.com/IhIN7dlgpN
The problem also seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon.
As recently as 2014, a person getting stuck inside a donation bin was so rare — and seemed so benign — that it was cause for jokes. “I think they should have left him in there, personally,” one East Vancouverite told a CTV news crew after a man in his 20s became trapped inside the main compartment of a bin for the Developmental Disabilities Association.
The next year, a well-known homeless advocate named Anita Hauck was killed in a Pitt Meadows clothing-donation bin as she tried to grab a jacket and a blanket for a fellow resident of a nearby tent city.
Ever since, Canada has not managed to go more than a few months without someone being fatally injured by a clothing bin, with countless more instances of people having to be rescued.
