The Class

I took a course my sophomore year titled Community Immersion in which I studied the for-profit, non-profit, and government sectors of my local community through the lens of systems thinking.  Throughout the class, we met many different people who play important roles in the community.  Many of them related to the health and well being of the environment, which influenced my project. 

Visiting the Landfill

Visioning

Our class decided that, with systems thinking, we could reduce the amount of waste (in weight) created at our school campus.  Because we were a new school, any waste reductions we made through strategic improvement projects in the first year would scale as the school grew.  We believed our impact could be significant in just over a few years.

We created a vision statement and project goal

We determined which projects would have the greatest impact and desirability with the lowest effort/cost to implement.

Creating a Baseline / My Sorting Project

To know if we met our goal, we had to determine a baseline for the amount of trash created daily.  After learning about sampling processes, we decided to weigh the trash twice a week for 10 weeks to create a baseline. I happened to have the epiphany.  Since we were measuring how much trash we wasted by pounds, we would need to know how much (in weight) of each type of material we were wasting to assess what types of trash we needed to tackle the hardest. Measuring the trash as a whole wouldn't tell us what to tackle, since not all materials have the same density (mass/volume ratio). We tried separating the types of trash by hand, but this ended up being a complete disaster.

 This lead me to come up with another idea - placing sorting bins throughout the school. When students needed to throw away trash, they would need to know what type of material their trash was and throw it away in the correct bin. This wounded up saving a load of time measuring trash. Of course it was bumpy. We had to figure out the most strategic locations for each bin, because we only had so many bins in the whole school and it was unnecessary to have one of each type in every room. We then had to get everyone on board with actually throwing the correct things away, which also was a struggle at first.

My Leadership Role / Compostable or Reusable Utensils & Containers

The project I was in charge of went through a few renditions. From the beginning I knew that I wanted to focus on plastic, but I wasn't sure whether I wanted to reuse, recycle, or compost. Eventually though, I landed on making all the plastic food supplies in the school reusable and compostable. This worked well since one of my fellow students was working on getting a compost bin. I started by projecting a broad plan in my head, then thoroughly planning out all the steps of the project, estimating how long each step might take, and ordering the steps to ensure I completed the project on time.  The result was a Gantt chart I could follow throughout the project.

Preparing the Project

In order to complete my project I had to first reach out to our food caterer and talk about transitioning from the plastic food containers they were providing us to compostable food containers. Coincidentally in my favor, they were already working on said transition. After obtaining the new containers, I moved towards getting utensils. I had to scour the internet to find the most quantitative and low price pack of compostable utensils. When I found the perfect utensils, all that was left for me to do was to purchase and put them in place of our plastic ones.  In the end, We finally had our compostable/reusable containers & utensils.

Launching the Project

I also had to convince my peers about the importance of conserving energy.  To do this I made a graphic that was posted by all the light switches in the building.  I also presented the project to the student body at a chapel meeting so they could understand the value of turning off lights when not in a room.

The Final Outcome

At the end of the year my class again took measurements of the waste our school produced.  Using similar sampling techniques to the baseline measurements and no longer measuring trash separately, we found that we had reduced the amount of daily waste by 45% percent.  The result of all the class' projects together allowed us to exceed our goal by 80%.  

Life Skills

In carrying out my project I developed my confident communicator skills.  Talking to and Sending emails to people I didn't know dragged me a tiny bit out of my usual comfort zone. However, after taking the leap, I found that I could  communicate easily with all of these individuals through professional means and the results were extremely positive for the project.  They were always more than willing to help and often gave valuable input that worked to push my project forward.

I also had to be a motivated student in a way that was very different than in a typical class.  My project wasn't something my teacher designed.  Rather, I designed the process and was fully responsible for its outcomes.  Although my classmates and teachers were willing to help, it was my motivation, organization, and effeciency that carried the project through.  There were times when I simply had to push through the slow days to ensure that progress on this project could continue, but for the most part, it ran at a smooth pace. I am pleased with the progress I made and the fact that I created and completed this project in a relatively short period of time and that it was a part of a much greater project to help our environment.

Finally, I had to demonstrate my resilience on numerous occasions.  There were times when I had to wait for responses to emails or to meet up and discuss with people. I had to be patient but not lose my motivation during these times. There were times when I had to change ideas or tactics and go back to the drawing board, but I never let discourage me. Instead, I kept pushing through it all, knowing deep down that my work was important for the betterment of my school and community.