The development of our project comes at a time when CMU has lost its former position of domination in the national Recyclemania competition. We are currently near the bottomamong the 230 colleges involved. Recently, CMU has been focusing more attention on decreasing its CO2 footprint, to which waste production contributes a relatively smallamount. However, recycling is critically for reducing landfill size and using fewer virgin resources. With the current recycling climate in view, our group decided to create arecycling weigh-in station to be set up in the University Center recycling room.
The station is composed of a scale and a computer. The users weigh their items then input the amount into the computer. The computer calculates CO2 savings that result fromtheir recycling then records both values on the StepGreen website. In the future, we would like to have the scale automatically send the data without needing the user to manuallyinput the values into the computer. We would also like to research new ways to motivate individuals as informing them of their CO2 savings is not always an effective motivator.