Shortened Environment Report
Max Polosky
From Spring 2021 to Spring 2022, I worked on my first truly independent passion project. I teamed up with another kid my age with the goal of making an impact on the local environment and waste disposal. Here is a brief overview on how it went.
Once we knew we wanted to help the local environment, we had to come up with specific ways in which we could accomplish this. We started by meeting with outreach employees of a local recycling facility. From this, we noticed that people aren’t that good at dealing waste properly, causing environmental harm and risking facility employees. Therefore, we wanted to do something about this. We set out some goals according to “SMART” (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-based) goals for ourselves. Our overall goal was to help the recycling facility by making people recycle properly in our community. The goal was to be accomplished by the spring of 2022. Now the question was: how would we actually do this?
We experimented with many ways of achieving this goal of awareness.
Posters: Were to be informational, good-looking, and convey information quickly, they gave tips on objects people were bad at sorting like batteries, black plastic and soft plastic (which all can’t be recycled). They were successful in that people liked how they looked and said they’d hang them up in their homes.
Surveys: We used survey quizzes to friend groups and to the local HOA to gauge what people here are generally bad at sorting (soft plastics, black plastic, batteries). Later, we used survey quizzes to test the sorting skill and memory of the groups we contacted, which seemed to correlate with improved memory of our topics.
Website: The website was the hub of all that we did. It had a brief summary of what we were doing with our project, information on recycling, and environmental news articles. It also had our posters on it. Most of our publications also had a QR code that lead to the website and hopefully more interest on our project. You definitely could see an increase in website visits after every survey or poster distribution.
Nonprofit: To give out service hours as incentives to other middle and high schoolers, we decided to make a nonprofit organization. The legal process was long, but in the end we were able to get verified. This brought credibility to our project and will allow donations and service hours in the future.
Overall, I gained many project management skills over the duration of the project. Goal-setting, timelines, interacting with other people, graphic design, and functional writing. This project was a general introduction to making a difference in the world. Looking back on everything, I also see that in our current busy, instant-gratification, short attention span society, making people remember and commit to a bigger cause like the environment is fairly difficult. If this kind of project is to succeed, tangible results must be delivered to participants, or they will go back to worrying about the more visible issues in their lives. I hope to use these experiences and important insights to hone in on a specific area to use my skills in and to make a bigger difference in the local environment.
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