Aryan Tuteja has long advocated for environmental awareness throughout his years at Discovery Canyon Campus High School. Last year, this advocacy became action.

Tuteja, 18, and a group of students designed and presented a new sorting system for recycling everyday waste at their school during the 2025-26 school year.

Utilizing artificial intelligence, their invention named “EcoIdentify” determines whether an item is recyclable or garbage and places it in its appropriate bin housed inside a mechanical frame. One simply needs to place their item on its platform, flick a switch and the machine does the rest.

Tuteja said the reason behind their creation is to make recycling more efficient.

The ball for EcoIdentify got rolling following a survey assignment in his civics class. When he found that nine of 14 teachers in the school didn’t recycle because it was inconvenient, he began exploring solutions through technology.

This started during the 2024-25 school year with the development of an online resource center promoting local waste management services and sharing information about the environmental harm of not recycling during his sophomore year.

This was followed by an AI model developed to identify the different types of waste by scanning common items tossed into school bins and building a database. The model has scanned over 1,100 images and categorized them into six categories: cardboard, glass, metal, paper, plastic and general waste.

During this time, Tuteja also noticed fellow students preferring garbage bins simply due to closer proximity, despite knowing what could and couldn’t be recycled.

“As I was going through the work, it became clearer that, even if people knew what to do, they really wouldn’t do it unless something made it easier for them,” he said. “That’s when the idea of AI came in.”

Shortly after presenting his model at a science fair, Tuteja was encouraged by a competition judge to make a real impact.

“We had this idea to build a bin and then, just that night, I called up eight to 10 of my friends who are interested in engineering and three of them responded and said, ‘Yes, we are up for this,’” he recalled.

Tuteja formed a school club shortly after. Discovery High provided funding for the club while members utilized its engineering shop after school.

Also featuring members of the school’s robotics team, the club built a portable box design featuring a wooden frame, a pivoting platform, recycling and garbage bins, a miniature computer wired internally and a camera to identify each item. Total costs were under $200.

Incoming senior and club member Shaunak Gupta said that the club and the concept for the bin also attracted students with no interest in engineering. The result was a group of motivated students learning a vast array of skills, including coding, wiring, construction and marketing.

Gupta said he became interested in joining the club for the engineering aspect and later learned about how improper recycling can contribute to pollution.

“The reason that recycling is so important is that all these recyclables can go into trash and wealthier nations such as ourselves and Canada openly burn all this trash,” he said. “And that can create carbon monoxide, which causes respiratory issues for a lot of people and destroys habitats, organisms and ecosystems.”

Out of 292.4 million tons of municipal solid waste produced in 2018, 34.5 million tons were burned, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reported. That same year, 69 million tons were recycled and over 146 million tons were landfilled.

Once the sorter was built, it was placed near their school’s front desk during the 2025-26 school year and club members promoted it through posters and morning announcements.

Along with marketing and promotional strategies, Tuteja said the team refined the sorting bin after some public use and lessons learned. Zip-ties were replaced with soldered joints, some lumber was remeasured and recut and the AI model became more robust by gathering data from actual school waste.

Tuteja said what was originally supposed to be a one- or two-month process became ongoing throughout the school year, as kinks were worked out. When the machine worked as intended, though, he called the response “magical,” with many students curious about how it worked.

“We actually told our engineering teacher about this project and he literally just got up and he was like, ‘Guys, we’re going on a field trip. We’re going to see the trash can,’” he said.

Academy District 20 will begin its school year next week, and Tuteja said the sorting bin will return to Discovery Canyon while he begins taking classes at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden.

He hopes to further refine the sorter’s design by potentially developing a metal frame and improving its aesthetics. Pursuing a degree in entrepreneurship, he aims to develop the sorter as a product for commercial businesses.

He has already met with the Pikes Peak Library District about hosting the sorting bin next summer and with the Center of Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs about its viability.

He and other students are also in the process of kicking off their own nonprofit organization, EcoClim Solutions, to find new solutions to effects of climate change.

“You don’t need to be an engineer, you don’t need to be an entrepreneur, you just need to be motivated,” he said. “And that motivation can really push you beyond what any technical skill can.”