Public Awareness of Plastic Recycling in Berkeley and Oakland Pauling Sun Abstract With the unique characteristics of being light weighted and long durability, plastics become convenient products to the society. Unfortunately, plastics production uses nonrenewable resources, which may not be economically viable in the long run. One of the current alternatives is recycling. Domestic plastic recycling is difficult to accomplish because of the differences in individual awareness, habits and lifestyles. Once understand these differences, improvements of the current recycling program can be made. This study focuses on comparing cities of Berkeley and Oakland on how much the public knows about plastic recycling in their cities and the level of plastic recycling participation. Approximately 200 surveys are being collected in front of two separate supermarkets for each city on two consecutive weekends. Analyzed surveys do not support the first hypothesis, which proposed city of Oakland has the better knowledge of plastic recycling code than Berkeley. By using Chi-Square analysis, the result shows no significant difference between Berkeley and Oakland. (p = 0.7905). Another Chi-Square analysis tests the second hypothesis, which states that city of Berkeley has a higher level of plastic recycling participation. Result also shows no significant difference (p = 0.7418) base on the sample population. These findings are important to show that cities locate next to each other behave similarly even though they do not recycle exactly the same materials. Therefore, by influencing the adjacent cities to recycle more plastics, the nation-wide plastic recycling rate may increase and the dependency on nonrenewable resources to produce virgin plastics may decrease.Introduction Recycling has become one of the solutions to conserve natural resources by collecting used materials and manufacture secondary usable products. Materials made up of papers and glasses are being recycled constantly due to the reason that it is economically viable. Plastics, however, are not being recycled as frequently. In fact, plastic composes the majority of solid waste in the US and only 2% of the plastic wastes are recycled (Stone et al. 1992). With technology improvements and higher awareness of using recyclable plastics, recycling rate in the US has increased along with a decrease in landfill disposal (Subramanian 2000). As indicated by General Mill Supply Company (2003), a paper and plastic recycling company, the general plastic recycling process includes collection, identification, categorization, separation, and reclamation of the recyclable plastic into production of new plastic products. The new plastic products have two types, according to Fletcher and Mackay (1996), which may or may not replace the virgin plastic products. If the virgin plastic can be replaced with recycled plastic, then such process is “true” recycling (Fletcher and Mackay 1996). Otherwise, the “new market” recycling only creates another market for recycled plastic, which does not reduce the usage of virgin plastics (Fletcher and Mackay 1996). This idea is important to understand because the ultimate goal of plastic recycling is to reduce the extraction of nonrenewable resources that are used to produce virgin plastics. If the recycled plastic products cannot fulfill this goal, then plastic recycling cannot be considered as “true” recycling. There are products indicating that “true” recycling had been done (Ambrose et al 2002) such as plastic lumber for piers (Vincent et al. 1998). Therefore, with government recycling policies being adapted to everyone and high public participation, “true” plastic recycling can be done more commonly (Stone et al 1992, McDonald and Ball 1998). This research compares and contrasts the public awareness of plastic recycling in cities of Berkeley and Oakland. According to Alameda County Waste Management Authority, city of Berkeley only recycles plastic types #1 and 2, which consist of most of beverage bottles while city of Oakland recycles all plastic types #1 to 7 including most plastics on the market where public has access to (Alameda County Source Reduction and Recycling Board). It is interesting to recognize how much the public from these two cities knows about recyclable plastic types and the level of recycling participation. Geographically speaking, Berkeley and Oakland situated right next to each other, but they may or may not have the same recycling trend. Research likethis has never been performed before because previous researches focused mainly on the different plastic recycling methods and case studies of management. However, it is necessary to determine the current public awareness of plastic recycling in order to improve the existing recycling programs, which could potentially result in higher participation over time as technology advances with higher plastic recycling efficiency. Eventually, a significant portion virgin plastic market could be replaced by the “true” recycled plastic. The objective of this research is to compare resource conservations in the city of Berkeley and Oakland in terms of the public knowledge toward recyclable plastic in their city and public’s participation level specifically regards to plastic recycling. Since Oakland recycles plastic types #1 to 7, residents should be more aware of plastic recycling from such a straight forward message. Berkeley, on the other hand, has the highest per-capita membership in environmental organizations of any city in the US (City of Berkeley). For that reason, Berkeley residents should care more about protecting the environment and thus participate in recycling more with ease. Therefore, the proposed hypotheses are: Oakland residents should have higher public knowledge toward recyclable plastic codes and Berkeley residents should have a higher level of plastic recycling participation. Methods The study is based on conducting surveys at two stations in each city. Survey stations locate at different parts of the city in order to involve as many different neighborhoods as possible. To maintain a proper sampling process, all survey stations have the following characteristics: First, they are close to the residential area to avoid sampling from out-of-city individuals attracted by commercial areas such as those close to high-traffic public transportation stations or
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