Service Learning Experience with Garbology!!

Volunteer Date and Time:

Wednesday, February 15th, 2017
10:30am - 12:36pm (2 hours)

Event Organizer: Zach Bigelow (z.bigelow2143@edmail.edcc.edu)

My service learning was about Garbology (the study of waste). We collected trash from the trash bins around campus and categorized, by the following characteristics: compostable, recyclable, or garbage, collecting data from the results. The goals of this event was to research if people at Edmonds Community College used the trash labels correctly. This would determine if  Zach and people who have intentions to make our campus ecological friendlier can get funds from the college to perform further research.

Waste around campus relates to animal biology because some wastes like compost can feed and attract animal life like squirrel, raccoon, and crawls to our campus but plastic and certain human food from compost can be harmful to those animals as well. It is really important that not only we sort out garbage correctly but we ensure garbage gets into the bin and not on the ground around the trash area. We want to maintain all parts of our ecosystem; animal life is very important to preserve and becoming more sustainable will help us achieve this goal.

Since I was one of the first participants to get to the courtyard (meeting point) at the start of the event, Zach lead us to the EDCC campus farm to get the wheelbarrow to help in the garbage pick up process.

Our campus farm

Wheelbarrows used to collect trash bags.

My main job was to stay at the station and help Zac scale the initial weight of the garbage bags that were picked up from the main trash bin around campus. We then poured out the contents from the bags into a big plastic mat and started the sorting process.

Our trash “playground”

Zac prepared 3 different bags displayed in the picture, labelled: Trash only, recyclables, and compostables. These bags are where we put the correctly sorted out content, with the help of the garbage grabber (circled in yellow). After the sorting was completed, we weighed each of the 3 bags using a hand held digital scale (circled in red) and recorded data.

Summarizing Duties:

Step 1: Weigh the initial mass of each new garbage bags that were brought from
areas around the campus

Step 2: Sort garbage, compost, recycle into the correct bins.

Step 3: Weigh each of the 3 labeled bags after sorting.

Step 4: Repeat step 1 to 3.

I can relate sorting out the trash that was picked up to the idea of building a phylogenetic tree, because we first started by separating the types of waste based on their appearance. We then analyzed the material of the waste to identify whether it’s recyclable or not. Finally, the contents of the bags were placed into its proper bins. This is similar to how we classify organisms by their morphological characteristics and group them based on their similarities. If we considered each category of trash as “phylum” then we can group whatever we find to its respective place based on traits found in each piece of trash, or “taxa”.  The ideas we were taught in Biology can be demonstrated by the activities we perform in our daily life.

Within the 2 hours I was volunteering, I often encountered people incorrectly placing their recyclables or compost into the trash can. Bottles with their liquid still present was a common occurrence. It comes to little surprise that Zach had to sort through all of the trash cans around campus for an entire day. I am concerned about the ecological balance of our campus if these kinds of practices reoccur for a long period of time. Correctly sorting out garbage might not seem as important in our daily routine but it really calls for necessary teamwork in our community. While a group of people work hard to create a better ecological system for everyone, other people seem less mindful of their actions. By working together as a team, even as little as sorting trash correctly, we can improve our ecosystem tremendously.

Questions:

1. What can be done so that people would dump out liquid from their bottles before they recycle it?
2. How much funding is needed to increase the ecological balance of EDCC by a noticeable amount?
3. How much wildlife around EDCC is being harmed by the students disposing habits?
4. How sustainable would our campus become if every student disposed of just one piece of trash correctly?