Post from Lauren Fuess

I find myself at the end of our little recycling experiment this week and in fact we just finished our presentation to the class about the project.  In the process of reviewing our results and preparing that presentation we realized a number of things.  Most importantly we realized that the results we got weren’t very valid.  We found alot of problems with our methods, namely that no one had been monitoring at the same time (morning could range from 7 am to 10 am) and that some of us had been monitoring different bins in the same general location than others.  Honestly I don’t know what to draw from the monitoring aspect of the project.  It’s hard to draw any solid conclusions on such limited data. I think before we can move forward with any revamping of recycling on campus we need to redo this monitoring project with more standardized methods and include a lot more bins.  Then we might be able to get an idea of where recycling is happening, what the needs are, etc.  It’s frustrating to go through a week of monitoring and realize that we don’t have any solid results, but still we learned a lot from the project, especially through the mapping.  It’s a good starting place if nothing else.  Finally, it taught me how difficult the process of becoming more environmentally friendly can be.  It’s not as simple as one would think, as w ehave seen through this project.  Recycling on campus still has a long way to go, but this project was at least a start.