8+Science+1+Alec's+MSW+Project

Signage Across Country Day Alec Waugh 2/17/10

Introduction: Waste is a huge problem today in the US. But a lot of our waste can be recycled and sometimes we chose not to take advantage of this. The expirment that we are purposing is to see how much waste people actually put in the trash cans that could really be recycled. If we put signs up above some of the trash cans then it will reduce the amount of recyclable items in the trash can.

Materials:

1. GPS 2. Computer 3. Flyers 4. Trash cans 5. Tape

Procedure 1.Gather three other group members. 2.Gather as many materials you would need to make 20 signs 3.Each group member make five signs that say what can and cant be recycled and persuading people to reclycle what they can. 4.Each group member will need to post their signs around Rea Hall and the gym buliding. 5.Everyday from the 22nd to the 26th all the group members will need to check on each one of the cans that they put their own signs on at 1:00 pm and record how many recyclable items are in each one of the trash cans.

6.The group will come together after data collection and share data and then after as a group look at all the other trash cans that did not have the signs over them and count the amount of recyclable items in those trashcans and compare that number to the number of recyclable items in the cans with signs over them.

Independent Variable: More signage across the school Dependent Variable: decrease the amount of recycleables in trash cans

Control Group: Day when the signs are not up Expirmental Group: The 2 days when the signs are up

Data:


 * Number of recycleables || Day 1 no signs || Day 2 || Day3 ||
 * Lamonica || 2 || 12 || 8 ||
 * Wolf || 4 || 8 || 14 ||
 * Kiplinger || 4 || 6 || 4 ||
 * Mancia || 4 || 2 || 5 ||
 * Rattery || 4 || 4 || 8 ||
 * Thorn || 10 || 4 || 2 ||
 * Crews || 3 || 1 || 6 ||
 * Dennis || 6 || 3 || 1 ||
 * Warren || 2 || 2 || 1 ||
 * Rich || 9 || 2 || 0 ||
 * Cramer || 7 || 4 || 1 ||
 * Findley || 4 || 7 || 2 ||
 * Magarity || 9 || 1 || 0 ||
 * Average || 5.2 || 4.3 || 4.0 ||

Analysis: As you can see in our groups data, the trach cans had about and average of 6 recycleables in each of them before we put the signs up. Aft er we put the signs in the classrooms there is a steady decrease in the amount of recycleables in each trash can. With a decrease like this it shows thatr after we put the signs up, the number of recycleables in the trash cans came down.

Conclusion: Our hypothesis was suported because we stated that if we put up signs encouraging people to watch what they are throwing away, that it would then reduce the amount of recycleables in trase cans. Even though I am proud of this data I think that we had a few errors that we could have avoided. One error was that we only had three days of data collection and i think the data would have been much more accurate. Some of the chalenges in the expirment were that we had to collect all the data from the trash cans everyday and sometimes we would collect some a little bit after the others which would affect the data. Overall, after looking at what our data proved, i believe that if we increase signage across the school then it will make the students more aware of what they are throwing away and will make them make sure what they are throwing away cant be recycled.

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