Results
The yes/no questions (1, 3, and 3a)
hhw in your home? |
heard about the San Jose hhw Facility? |
made an appointment at the facility? |
In general, most people had not heard about the San Jose HHW Facility and even fewer said that they had made an appointment to deliver their waste to the facility. Because we had survey participants living in many parts of Santa Clara County, it may be safe to assume that those who make up the 'Yes' section of the third chart include a certain number of people who slightly misinterpreted the question and have dropped off HHW at other locations, but not the San Jose facility. Perhaps the third chart may be more accurately interpreted as the percent of people who have dropped off HHW at any disposal facility, which is still valuable data. Regardless of the question's interpretation, our data suggests that we can be 97.5% confident that the true proportion of people who have utilized an HHW facility is below 28.5%. However, this inference does not take into account the utilization of retail locations as places where people take their HHW, which may or may not be significant.
Interestingly, we found that a fair number of people who answered 'No' or 'Not Sure' to the first question went on to list hazardous items such as batteries, paint, and medications as items they had in their home. This makes it immediately apparent that in many cases HHW items are not being correctly identified. The issue of identification is undoubtably linked to a person's course of action when deciding what do with waste items; if one does not know that an object is considered hazardous waste, separate disposal methods are extremely unlikely to cross their mind.
Interestingly, we found that a fair number of people who answered 'No' or 'Not Sure' to the first question went on to list hazardous items such as batteries, paint, and medications as items they had in their home. This makes it immediately apparent that in many cases HHW items are not being correctly identified. The issue of identification is undoubtably linked to a person's course of action when deciding what do with waste items; if one does not know that an object is considered hazardous waste, separate disposal methods are extremely unlikely to cross their mind.
The Identification test (4)Overall ID ScoresID Scores (yes Q1) |
The identification test is a trick question because all eight objects are in fact HHW items. The goal of this section is to find out how well people can identify HHW is and if there are certain items that are repeatedly failing to be identified as hazardous. We found that in general, a fair number of people correctly circled all of the items, but over half of the subjects missed at least one. We split the data into two categories: people with HHW and people without HHW in their homes. The score distribution of those who answered yes has a higher mean and median, a lower standard deviation, and a clearer skew than those who answered no. This means that people who are aware they have HHW in their homes are more likely to correctly dispose of hazardous waste and have a better understanding of what items are hazardous. Thus, by spreading awareness about what specific objects are considered HHW, the City of San Jose can get more people to drop off their HHW at the facility or acceptable retail locations.
ID scores (no q1) |
specific responses (1 and 3b)
Commonly listed HHW itemsnoted barriers to dropping off HHW |
This chart shows the how times each HHW item was listed under Question 1. By discovering which items are the most prevalent in people's homes, the City of San Jose can hone its outreach strategies to target awareness about specific types of HHW.
Finally, the survey highlighted that the main barriers to people dropping off their hazardous waste are inconvenience, lack of specific location information and lack of general awareness about HHW. To address the first two problems, we created an ARCGIS map of retail drop-off sites in Santa Clara County and to address the third problem, we created a preliminary lesson plan for future educational workshops to be held at the San Jose Museum of Technology and several local schools.
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