About Social Media Today
Our neighborhood, like most across Minnesota, bustles on trash day. There is that constant din of large vehicles from a half dozen solid waste haulers, most of them driving a bit too fast. Every curb is dashed and dotted with carts and bins of various sizes and colors. Squat, plain, and almost always blue, our recycling bins have slowly, perhaps even reluctantly, become social icons for more sustainable communities.
Several years ago I decided to walk my block at dawn on trash day, shooting and talking into the nice mic on my new camera; I snapped all the blue bins curbside and verbally recorded each house number and number of bins I saw. Recycling is of course utterly utilitarian. However, I am a design teacher so I noticed that morning the way residents placed their carts and bins was often folksy and occasionally even artistic. Some arrangements felt like they could exemplify aesthetic principles with named attributes, e.g., orderly, chaotic, symmetrical, decorative, minimalist.
But my larger goal that morning was a mix of short and long term “practical” tasks; I reasoned that a half hour of data logging done over four weeks could help me “map” in some way my neighborhood’s sustainability. Stated in question form, As collective neighbors how do we fare in diverting our solid waste from landfills?
With a day’s worth of data in hand some numbers emerged in need of “crunching,” in my case the count of recycling bins per household. The officious phrase for a recycling container is actually “mobile garbage bin” (MGB). Our City of Roseville’s MGB’s are at an industry standard of 18 gallons. Residents here can have as many as they like and one can even add wheels that the City of Roseville will offer as kits, to make bins truly “mobile.”
Awash in numbers I quickly encountered the need for “indicators,” the specific ways one measures recycling as a component of a community’s sustainability. Recycling indicators as phrases sound technical but are always tangible: set-out rates, participation ratios, diversion rates, et al. A little research pointed me to a rather long-winded indicator: net volumetric diversion rate, per household, measured in MGB’s, by year and by month. Geeks in solid waste research typically like to measure recycling “by weight,” but volume makes more sense to me: landfills usually “fill up” and close their gates long before they “get too heavy.”
Unsurprisingly I wasn’t the first to undertake this kind of effort. In 2004 Minneapolis had mapped each of its blocks and St. Louis had pursued it as a major project in 2005, though the latter generated only tabular data. But St. Louis researchers did provide me with a “hypothesis” to test, if it turns out one’s neighborhood has “cul-de-sacs.” Cul-de-sac households recycle more than “straight-line-street” households, they had found.
Back to my story. After collecting four weeks of data I made a dozen maps using GIS “ArcMap” software. As a reader might know datamaps today are usually “digital,” so numerical patterns made visual can jump out, either right away or with a little statistical massaging. Demography, economics, and even social psychology each clearly play a role in why -- and how much -- we recycle. My maps pointed to some patterns, but, as “social-marketing” researchers frequently discover, crystal-clear findings often elude us. Regarding the St. Louis thesis, I observed that my block has one cul-de-sac, whereas our neighborhood has three total. Our block’s cul-de-sac did reveal statistically higher-scored clusters than straight-line counterparts, but only for one of the four collection weeks. Interestingly, the other two cul-de-sacs did not fare as well.
In an effort to gather a little feedback I created a “blue bins presentation portfolio” that centered on our neighborhood’s recycling patterns. My audience became attendees of a block party at our National Night Out (NNO) event on an August evening several years ago. Happily, it turned out some of my neighbors are “cartophiliacs,” a puffy term for map-lovers. At our appointed NNO block party some neighbors gathered around to view and discuss the folio; I got snippets of feedback, more questions than comments, between the arrival and departure of fire trucks and police canine units.
Folio spreads showed that our Midland Hills neighborhood (141 households) fared very well in its effort at diverting solid waste from landfills: we were 27% above all of Roseville’s average, and 3% above our particular recycling district’s average. Some Ramsey County data that I had obtained allowed me to calculate and map what I call green acres: MGB’s per household parcel-acre.
Our block’s “award winner” for a green-acres ratio was a household that diverted over 30 MGB’s per acre per month. A savvy neighbor who was hosting the block party joined me in pondering if there might be a relationship between our block’s “style” of housing stock (ranch, split-level, etc.) and residents’ recycling achievement; she went back into her house and returned with a huge color map of our neighborhood that she had gotten a few years ago from a City of Roseville planning office. At least two cartophiliacs stayed late, comparing and discussing patterns!
It is clear that good maps ask questions of us -- and we of them. Here’s one to ponder, as you next look down your street at the string of blue bins on trash day: will modest stories about what is happening at the neighborhood scale be as helpful in increasing landfill diversion (and alleviating global warming) as our more global “policy-making” pursuits? If the answer seems “yes,” or even “maybe,” then please talk to neighbors about it and exchange pledges to do more.
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“If we encourage the majority of [residents] to start saving their neighbourhoods we probably will end up saving the planet.”
– Peter Neilson, Executive Officer, New Zealand’s Business Council for Sustainable Development
