Ready, Set….

 

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As a group, we further discussed our plan about how we are going to go about the EACAP project and broke it up into more specific parts.

We still plan to distribute to about 10 people a list, where they will write down a large amount of things that they use, what they use that can be recycled, and what they actually recycle. This list will be formatted in the form of three columns, and was made today. The columns will consist of one of each thing listed above: what people use, what recyclable products they use, and what they actually recycle. We will then construct a graph for the 10 people with three lines: one with total things that they use, another with total recyclable things that they use, and another with things that they actually recycle. We will note how much larger the overall usage of recyclable materials is in comparison to the overall recycling to better understand how important it is that we make people aware that waste reduction needs to take place.

We will then write blurbs/short articles about each of the six initiatives (Bee Hives, MOBIUS Recycling, Food Recovery Network, Rain Barrels, Paper Waste Reduction,  and Bat Houses) on the Sustainability website providing an overview of each initiative and adding an appropriate image to each. The images were all gathered this morning.

Knowing that our graphs will most likely show that not everything that needs to be recycled gets recycled by the people we survey, we will also mention how improvements in terms of increased recycling and waste reduction will help each of the initiatives be more successful not only at Penn State Berks, but anywhere.

The Environmentalist Stirs Up Plan A

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Loads of cans have been recycled by consumers and are ready to be hauled away to be remade into new and more useful products.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

Our first plan to increase the awareness of the need for recycling involves having a couple of randomly selected individuals record everything that they use on a daily basis that are recyclable. This could be anything and everything that at some point in time can be recycled. It will also include a section of the things that they totally use up that are recyclable, and whether or not that person actually took the time and effort to recycle them or not (things like aluminum cans, paper, etc.)

This plan could turn out very successfully, or it could be flawed, as people could purposely just give us the best possible more “environmentally friendly” answer we could ask for just to gt the project done with, so the plan is to not make it long or boring. Hopefully this will not be the case, and we can make it interesting enough for people to actually want to participate, but we will see what we can do.

The Environmentalist Begins to Take Action

Photo Credit: Penn State Photographer

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Real life photo of the carelessness of college students on campus in terms of recycling

 

We met with the Sustainability Team and talked about how the lack of recycling on the Penn State Berks campus is disturbing and students are not doing their part to help the environment and recycle even though there are a lot of efforts being made by the people on campus to allow recycling to happen and to make it easy to do so.

We decided that our project would revolve around a web page that intends to give incentive to students around campus and around the world to put in the little effort that is needed to recycle materials, and it is meant to teach those students that that little effort can go a long way in protecting the environment and, in turn, making their lives better as well as the lives of those around them. We want to try to get students to recycle recyclable materials and throw true waste in trash cans and make sure nothing ever gets littered.

-Asher Fair, Ben Straka, Derek Dewald