The City of Saskatoon spent $23,600 on an AI recycling bin that tells users where to dispose of their plastic and paper products.

The purchase of Oscar Sort was made in January. The City says the purpose of the bot was to help the City understand what is being sorted correctly and incorrectly in public spaces, save the City money by reducing staff time for extended on-site monitoring and audits of this behaviour, and ultimately save taxpayers money by extending the useful life of the landfill.

Oscar Sort recorded a total of 2176 disposals in July, with only 37 per cent of them being thrown in the correct bin. This is down from 49 per cent accuracy in June.

The Prairie Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation says this is a terrible misuse of taxpayer dollars, and it’s not a good precursor to 2025-26 budget deliberations coming up in November.

“It’s absurd the city thinks it should spend tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to tell those same taxpayers what bin to put their pop cans in,” says Gage Haubrich. “The City of Saskatoon is trying really hard to win a government waste award this year for this project.”