VIENNA SCIENCE FAIR

Does age change the way people think about recycling?

How does the quiz change the amount of recycling of a class?

Background research:

People have been recycling since ancient times, precisely since 1031 when in the Japanese culture
people were reusing everyday items such as paper due to lack of resources, and the long process of
making goods. Paper production was popular at the time and it did not take long for the process of
reusing already used paper to spread across the country. People were shredding their documents
and records then made new, fresh, perfectly fine paper out of it. Soon people realized how much
money they can save, and make by recycling the materials and began to do it even more often than
before. As a result of that, recycling slowly began to expand. Due to the current circumstances in
recent years it has been more and more popular, thanks to people finally realizing how bad the
climate change situation is.

During World War II recycling became more common. When armies did not have enough
ammunition to fight the enemy the government made some programs to collect unused or not
wanted stuff and make a lot of practical things for their army. The American and Canadian
ministries created a series of propaganda posters to make people recycle. These posters played a
major role in recycling during World War II. People were recycling everything they could find. As
they were afraid that they would lack resources. For example citizens recycled paper, scrap metal,
tin, rubber, and food waste. They made tanks, bombs and other ammunition out of scrap metal and
life rafts, gas masks, and other things out of rubber to help men during the war.

The industrial revolution has a lot of impact on recycling too. Since it was new to the world that
machines could make products without any help, people started to use it all around the world. Due
to this they also started to burn coal so the machines could work, as there was no other way. At least
at the time. This has introduced new sources of air and water pollution. Since then, very little
amount of people have recognised this problem. But in recent years, scientists have noticed how
much our surroundings have changed and they realized it is climate change. Like we said before,
people have been recycling since ancient times but they only recycled paper. But around the 1970s,
as we mentioned, people started to notice a change so they decided to recycle everything including
batteries, metals, different types of plastic etc. since it was new, not a lot of people really cared as
they did not see the problem.

Reduce, Reuse and Recycle otherwise known as the 3 Rs are the principles of reducing, resuing, and
recycling materials. It encourages us to follow or think about these three steps before getting rid of
something. The mentioned ideas are more and more popular and known thanks to the
environmental activist and the spreading of the problems on social media. Reduce motivates people
to lower the use of non recyclable or items that go through a long process before degradation. Reuse
gives people the idea to reuse their items such as plastic bottles, cups, cutlery, paper, or even metal
items before throwing them out, while recycling persuades people to make something new out of
used products. In my opinion the last mentioned “R” is the most known. Countries usually
encourage you to do that the most often .

People all around the world are aware of this issue but the bigger problem is that we noticed this
quite late and scientists say that we have about 10 more years before a catastrophic climate change
happens. Many scientists believe that if we teach the new generation to recycle, we can save our
planet from climate change. So schools around the world should try to teach the following
generation to recycle so they can live healthy lives, but there are still some countries that lack this
information and are not able to help. Even though we are not able to spread this knowledge to the
different nations, we wanted to make sure that people in this school are aware of this problem.

Our project is about recycling and sharing/testing knowledge about recycling. We will test if older
students are more informed about this topic and if younger ones recycle more often. We will try our
best to get as much information as we can and to get our results as accurate and true as possible. We
hope that our project will encourage young and older kids/people to be aware of this topic and to
show everyone how they really are aware of this. Since we are doing this only in our school, we do
not expect this to be very big or to reflect on the whole world. As much as we try and recycle, we
also need to have some knowledge about it. So we hope that not all the little kids will only recycle
but they will have some what a idea of why they are doing this. Same with the older kids.

Hypothesis:

Our hypothesis is that younger kids recycle more, but older kids might know more about the
environment than to actually recycle. We think this because the younger kids do not have as much
knowledge but the teachers encourage them to recycle, the younger the better. Teachers teach their
students to recycle so they have a good economical footprint. But the older they are, the less they
care. For the older kids, they will know more because they have more experience/knowledge about
this because they understand the news and can research about it.

Variables:

Independent variable: our independent variable is knowledge

Dependent variable: our dependent variable is recycling
Fixed variable: our fixed variable is the people from ISB

Methodology:

Materials - our methodology is the quiz about recycling (knowledge + if they generally recycle) and
ISB students.

Procedure:
Our experiment was about recycling. When you read the title you might think, how is that even
relevant? Well believe us, this is very relevant as we strongly think that age has to do a lot with the
knowledge about recycling. We wanted to understand at what age people are more aware of the
climate change and when they try to recycle the most. We wanted to understand the climate change
situation and want to help scientists to solve this problem by maybe reminding people (at that age
they do not recycle that much) to recycle their everyday waste. Our hypothesis was that younger
kids recycle more, but older kids might know more about recycling. Therefore our goal was to find
out at what age ISB students recycle more and have more knowledge about recycling using a brief
questionnaire about our topic. We sent out this google form to the classes from year 5 to year 13 and
asked everyone to fill it out. Thankfully most of the students did it, but our information was still
not very precise. To make sure it is, we asked one person from each class some questions (similar to
the ones in the form) and tested their knowledge about it. After receiving the answers, we made a
table to find out which years students recycle more.

safety/ethical consideration/risk assessment - since our experiment was mostly on our computers,
there were not a lot of risk assessments.

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Data and result:

Do you use Do you Are you How much How many Are you
the know why aware of trash do animals are aware how
recycling we recycle? the climate people extinct (or bad it is to
bins placed change burn a close to burn trash?
in the situation? year? extinction)
classroom? because of
climate
change so
far?

Year 5 yes yes yes 20 million 77 yes

tons

Year 6 yes yes yes 99 thousand 561 yes

kg

Year 7 yes yes yes 2.6 trillion 77 yes

tons

Year 8 yes yes yes 20 million 92 yes

tons

Year 9 yes yes yes 2.6 trillion 77 yes

tons

Year 10 yes yes yes 2.6 trillion 77 yes

tons

Year 11 yes yes yes 20 million 92 yes

tons

Year 12 yes yes yes 20 million 92 yes

tons

Year 13 yes yes yes 20 million 561 yes

tons

Do you recycle at Do you use the Is there more Do you know

home? recycling bins plastic in the how many plastic
placed in the oceans or on the islands are there
classroom? land? in our oceans?
 Year 5 no yes oceans 100

Year 6 yes yes oceans 12

Year 7 yes yes oceans 4

Year 8 no yes land 100

Year 9 yes yes oceans 6

Year 10 yes yes oceans 1

Year 11 no yes oceans 2

Year 12 yes yes land 100

Year 13 yes yes oceans 115

Analysis and conclusion:

As a result we have noticed that our hypothesis was incorrect. In fact, after receiving the answers of
the quiz and asking students from each class, we found out that younger kids know as much
information about recycling and climate change as the older kids. We also found that older kids
recycle more at home than at school. With the help of our charts that we made, we could see clearly
that our hypothesis was not correct. In our experiment year 7 performed the best from the rest of
the classes. We would say that our hypothesis did make sense, but was not true. As you can see, we
did not expect them to know everything or have everything correct. We mainly wanted to know if
they actually recycle or not as this topic is very serious in our school. But we feel like the higher the
grade, the less they care. But we have learnt that age does not matter according to our charts.

Recommendation:

If someone would decide to do this experiment again we would recommend to ask everyone about
the questions individually. We would encourage people to take their time and do this in a more
organized, less stressful way. Since we decided to do this quiz online, people had the option to
google answers and to cheat. A few students probably did not answer truthfully as some of the
answers do not make sense . If someone had to do this experiment again we would recommend
giving everyone a short form or quiz on paper (so they would not cheat) and then asking them some
questions about recycling verbally. This way, they would get an accurate, honest answer. But since
we did not have much time, this was the best option. We would also recommend adding more
specific questions and making the questionnaire longer so the result is more accurate.
Resources:

History of recycling:
➔ https://www.hintonswaste.co.uk/news/history-of-recycling-timeline/
➔ https://quinterecycling.org/the-history-of-waste-and-recycling/
H0w many animals are extinct because of climate change:
➔ https://earthly.org/en-US/how-many-species-are-extinct-due-to-climate-change