Changing the world - one blue bin at a time

Prof. John Phelan has high expectations of students in his Com351 Leadership Class. The main course requirement is nothing less than ‘change the world.’ After learning leadership concepts in class, student teams are given free rein to identify a project that will effect change in their local, national or even global communities. Teams are carefully composed to reflect a balance of genders and a mix of QSB Commerce and the international exchange students who make up a large portion of this elective course open to third- and fourth-year Commerce students.

“The students always rise to the challenge,” John says admiringly. “It’s a great opportunity to put their idealism into action, learn about self-directed teams in a real life situation, and to demonstrate their own leadership abilities.”

Students in the winter term tackled such issues as improving clean water access in Africa, increasing AIDS awareness in Kingston, and promoting online volunteering, among many others.

Improving recycling rates in Queen’s residences was the project tackled by Farhad Afzalzada, Lauren Bailey, Jeffrey Cheng, Gordon Frenke and Fabian Hascoet. After discovering that students in residence have to take their recyclables to a common recycling bag on each floor, the team decided to conduct an experiment. They wanted to see if placing blue recycling bins in students’ rooms would result in more materials being recycled.

They collected the garbage from wastebaskets in each room on a floor in Gordon-Brockington Hall, sorted it into recyclable and non-recyclable waste, then weighed both piles. The following week, the group delivered recycling bins to every room on the same floor. After allowing a week’s worth of waste to accumulate, they again collected and measured the amount of recyclable and non-recyclable materials in the wastebaskets located next to the new blue recycling bins.

In the first instance, 38% of material thrown in the garbage bins was actually recyclable. After students had the blue bin option in rooms, that amount dropped to 14%—a reduction of nearly 25%.

“What was really interesting was that most of the students on that floor had considered themselves to be avid recyclers,” says Gordon Frenke, the team’s spokesperson. “It was great to see that adding the recycling bins still had a significant impact.”

All the students were graded on these projects that accounted for 35% of their final mark. “It’s not always all about the marks,” says their professor. “Though teams had to demonstrate that they were putting concepts learned in class into practice, the work they did had a real ripple effect in the community.”

Queen’s residence staff agreed. Thanks to the Commerce team’s efforts, blue bins will be distributed throughout the Gord/Brock residence in the 2011/2012 academic year. The team plans to continue to measure outputs in this residence-wide experiment in the hope that the blue bin program will be implemented in all residences on campus the following year.