8+Science+3+Emily's+MSW+Project

Planner Waste Reduction ** **Emily Navarro 3/4/10 Section 8-3** ===Introduction: For our Municipal Solid Waste project, Siboney and I are working on planner waste elimination. Every student in the middle school is given a planner at the beginning of the school year, and there are always students that buy a new one sometime throughout the year. Right now, 511 planners have been sold to students. What happens to these planners when they are used up? They are thrown in the trash can because the hard cover and rings cannot be recycled. What we want to figure out is if students would be willing to switch over to using Bucsnet to find homework assignments instead of writing in their planners. This would reduce 170,521 grams of waste per year or 376 pounds. That's a big deal. We think that if students could rely on Bucsnet for their planning, then we could make a significant difference in the amount of waste the middle school produces.===

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=The Procedure:=

1. The first thing we'll do is go to the Bookstore and check to see how many extra planners have been bought in the year from her lists of items sold 2. This information would help us find out how many extra planners are bought in a year. Not including the ones that everyone gets at the beginning of the year 3. Next, we have to figure out what is recyclable of the planners which would include talking to the Bookstore lady and/or other people who might know (the rings can't be recycled) if we recycled every planner used at ccds, then it would take up a lot of time and energy to rip out the paper from the rings and put it in recycling 4. Create a survery of 3 questions asking all middle school students about their use of planners and if they would be willing to only get their homework off bucsnet instead of from their planner http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TTK96JR 5. Figure out how much waste is produce a year that would be eliminated from buying planners every year. 6. Sort out all of our data from the survey and figure out if this idea could actually work out 7. Talk to the Board Members about our idea and see if it is a possibility INDEPENDENT- Bucsnet VS. Planners DEPENDENT- Waste produced from planners

EXPERIMENTAL- Using only Bucsnet to check homework CONTROL- Using planners to check homework

[|VOICETHREAD LINK] =IV. Data=

In our survey we asked 5 questions. below in the chart are our results. For number three 23.20 was the most common answer and the no colum is used to represent the other amount of days people chose.

 * 1) Do you write your HW in your planner? yes or no
 * 2) Do you check Bucsnet for HW? yes or no
 * 3) How often do you check Bucsnet each week? 1 day, 2 days, 3 days, 4 days, 5 days, 6 days, 7 days, or 8 days?
 * 4) Could you stop using your planner and use Bucsnet instead? yes or no
 * 5) In order to reduce non recyclable waste, would you be willing to use planner paper in your binder without having the hard cover and rings

=V. Analysis=
 * Questions || Yes || No ||
 * Question 1 || 94.00 || 6.00 ||
 * Question 2 || 67.00 || 33.00 ||
 * Question 3 || 23.20 || 87.80 ||
 * Question 4 || 32.00 || 68.00 ||
 * Question 5 || 57.00 || 43.00 ||
 * The following are questions from a survey we created, taken by 100 middle school students.**

=VI. Conclusion= ===Our hypothesis was not supported by the data because we predicted that if students were willing to commit to only using Bucsnet instead of their planners, we could reduce a lot of waste from being produced. However, in our survey we asked students if they could stop using their planners and just use Bucsnet instead. 32% said yes they could, and the majority, 68% said they could not go without their planners. This would mean our hypothesis was not supported. But our data also showed that the majority of students would be willing to rid their planners of the hard cover and rings so that they would be able to recycle the paper once it was used which is a definite option. Although, I think that sometime in the future now that our school is becoming more and more green by the year, our school will stop selling planners and just let students get their assignments and announcements through Bucsnet. Siboney and I didn't really experience many challenges or experimental errors in our experiment since our experiment really was mainly done on the computer as we were emailing to collect data and making our graphs, etc. However, one of our problems was that the survey we sent to about 480 students, the survey only allowed us to see 100 responses. This would be an experimental error because we didn't cause this error. Overall I think this was a helpful experiment in knowing what we need to do to reduce the amount of waste produced from planners in the middle school, and the overall waste on campus.===