nekoah013
Registered: December 2013
City/Town/Province: bennington
Posts: 1
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On Friday October 4th, 2013 I was a part of the First Friday Event. I was part of a group consisting of myself, others students, and a few faculty members whom requested a booth to discuss local environmental issues. The survey I proposed, focused on recycling, composting, and local aspects to those issues. Unfortunately, the weather was not the greatest and the World’s Biggest Peanut Butter Cup attracting more people than our display. However, that did not deter us and we still met our goal of filling out the surveys we printed.
We chose to discuss Recycling because the students, including me, took Jeanie Jenkins Current Environmental Issues summer intensive class at CCV. This class broaden our idea of human impact on the environment. Personally, I was a part of Recycling Club during High School, and have particpated Green Up Day for four consecutive years. We saw recycling as an easy way for people to make a difference. One unique display item that we had was a new composting bin produced by a local waste management company, TAM. It was interesting item, due to a recently passed Vermont law, which states that grocery stores must compost, and by 2020 extend this regulation to households.
The Survey Jenet and I put together was a huge success. We printed 95 copies of the survey and 94/ 95 surveys were completed. This number would be vastly different if we sat at our both the whole time, since majority of the people bypassed our display to see the giant peanut butter cup. As a result, we used the divide and conquer philosophy. Three of us went away from the booth and asked people to fill out our surveys, while 2-3 individuals stayed behind at the booth. The surveys purpose was to gather statistics to help us find out what was holding people back from recycling, or why they don’t recycle. We wanted to know this information so we can help educate people to make the decision to recycle, since recycling help reduce the need for virgin materials, while extended the life of already used product. My Groups ultimate goals were to either have recycling bins in the downtown area of Bennington, or in the local businesses. Unfortunately, I am no longer a part of this group, since I transferred for the Spring Semester to Sterling College. As a result, I will not know if they succeed with those goals.
I chose to transfer from CCV to Sterling College, since Sterling objective is environmental stewardships. I had an amazing opportunity to transfer for the 2014 Spring Semester, so I did. At Sterling College, I can focus more on environmental issues and ecology, since my major there will be ecology.
After the event I meet with Dr. Herbert, who is a statistics professor at CCV, to gather statistics from the surveys that were filled out from the event. After gathering the statistics we examined the data and tried to explain and interpret it. From the data we could see that people lack knowledge for disposing batteries (50/94), scrap metal (51/94), electronic (35/94), printer ink cartridges (46/94), and many did not know about composting (54/94). Also, a considerable amount of people complained of lack of public containers (36/94). I believe that 94 survey is small for gathering statistics, but I still think it is enough to see trends, which would only exacerbate with more surveys. Dr. Herbert and I are trying to meet with the local Energy Committee to share our group’s findings and try and make a different. Unfortunately weather has been postponing the meeting, and so is my college transfers. Right now, it looks like there is a possibility of meeting during Spring Break, or Summer Break. Alas, I will make sure that something will happen with the data.
All in all, good times were had, while trying to improve the community. Even though we had some disadvantages, like the main event of the World Biggest Peanut Butter Cup, we still manage to do what sought out to accomplish; which was to inform people of local environmental issues and initiative, while gathering statistical information to improve the community.
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