IC Students Deliver Recycling Presentation to City Council

By Benjamin Cox on February 14, 2017 at 10:34am

The Jacksonville City Council workshop last night saw a preliminary presentation about Jacksonville’s recycling habits by students from Illinois College. Students collected data by driving the streets of Jacksonville and recording those who had recycling set out on their curb. The students then used that preliminary data to create a survey about resident’s recycling habits.

Dr. Jan Buhrmann, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Illinois College, explains what they hope to achieve with the survey.

“The reason for sending out a city-wide survey is so that we can find out if people know about the recycling services and if they do they know what materials can be recycled, and if they do, do they know what day the recyclables are picked up on their block. Those are the types of questions that the city doesn’t really know. Doing the initial pilot study, going from street to street, we have a little bit of information, but now we are going to try to get it on a city-wide basis. Just really find out what people know and what they don’t know, so that the city will have some ideas about how to go about spreading the word and better informing people.”

Dr. Buhrmann explains that the surveys will be sent out over the next month.

“We just got the surveys finished, we will probably do a couple of fine tuning touches on it and over the next month or so, we will administer the survey. It will go out in the water bills. Hopefully we get quite a few surveys back. We will actually have some data for the city by probably about the end of April.”

Dr. Buhrmann says that the College is offering a little incentive for residents to return the surveys.

“We got funded through the college’s student-faculty research fund to be able to offer 10 $50 gift cards. So when we get all the surveys collected, we will do a random drawing and we will contact those individuals and tell them they won a gift card. Hopefully it will give people incentive to return the survey.”

The surveys will be sent out with your water bills and can be returned to drop boxes at County Market and at the Municipal Building.