Cafeteria & Library Statistics

Last week, while in the cafeteria, I observed the dining practices of students in the school cafeteria. I really wanted to know how they felt about recycling and what their real everyday interaction with the Green Initiative looked like. Were they regular recyclers, did they take out reusable plates, did they return them. I focused specifically on waste management in the cafeteria: what students (and teachers) did with their trash. On Tuesday 2nd Lunch, Thursday 1st Lunch, and Friday 2nd Lunch I counted how many plastic bottles were put into the recycling and how many were put in the trash. The recycling bin and the trash were only 15 feet apart.

Tuesday: 31/56 milk bottles were recycled
Thursday: 18/33 milk bottles were recycled
Friday: 26/47 milk bottles were recycled

Consistently, only a little less than half of the milk bottles I counted were thrown into a trash can only 15 feet away from the recycling. Although this a huge improvement from 100% of milk bottles being thrown out, we're still not quite there and BHS is not as green as they like to make themselves seem. I always thought that the insane amounts of "raising awareness" at Brookline High School about global warming and such was unwarranted, but clearly a lot of people are still not totally conscious of the way the choices they and their peers make affects the total carbon output of the school.

Next I went to the Library, curious about how people saved and recycled paper. I observed that there were without a doubt more recycling bins than trashcans and this helped improve paper recycling. In a similar experiment to the one I did in the cafeteria, I saw that flat paper was ALWAYS recycled. I didn't see a single person put flat paper into a trash can. The paper that was thrown into a trash can, which I observed only three times, had already been crumpled up into a ball which I found very interesting.