Campus dining plastic audit
This website details the results of our internal plastic audit. For our plastic audit, we visited various eating options available within the campus and noted the different items that are sold in plastic and the plastic number for each of those items.
Motivation
Our goal is to make recycling easier and less confusing for the general public. One possibility to improve recycling is to educate the public about how to recycle by spreading awareness about what items can be recycled. Another complementary but perhaps equally important approach to improve recycling is to perhaps also make recycling less confusing and easier to do. The goal of our audit here was to investigate how confusing is plastic recycling within the Princeton campus.
The below two graphs show the distribution of various plastic types within the various cafes and dining halls on campus.
Our above findings are quite revealing -- items within the campus are available in so many different plastic types but within the town of Princeton, only #1, #2, and #5 are recyclable!
If we investigate this further, then our findings are more revealing as to how confusing recycling could be within the campus. The below table shows the different items that are sold and available in plastic packaging and the type of plastic they are packaged in.
Items Plastic number
------------------------- ----------------------------------
Drinks 1
Square container 1
To-go-dressing 5
Salad container 1
Yogurt 5
Fruit cup 7
Soda cups Unlabeled
Water Cups 6
Bowl covers Unlabeled
Sabra snackers 1
Cereal 2, 5, and 6
Sushi 1
Veggie snackers 7
Sandwich container 1
Cup lids 6
Soup lids 6
What is interesting about the above findings is that the same items can be available in different plastic types and many items are either unlabeled or the labels are hard to find.
Take-away
The biggest take-away from our plastic audit is that recycling within the campus can be confusing for the general public. This is because various items sold (and available) on campus having varying number of plastic numbers in them. Crucially within the town of Princeton only plastic numbers #1, #2, and #5 are recyclable. Numbers #3-4 and #6-7 are NOT recyclable. We think that this will naturally make recycling harder for the general public and students.
Our biggest conclusion from this audit is that we need to make different items available primarily in plastic type #1, #2, or #5 so as to improve recycling within the campus.