This week was similar to last week, as Shelby and I continued to conduct heavy amounts of literature research. I focused on physical and mental consequences of pollution and trash in general. It is important to account for different types of pollution as many are relevant to multi-hauler trash. Multi-hauler trash causes an increase in TRAP (traffic-related air pollution), an increase in noise pollution, and is overall more traffic on the roads. In addition, trash can have direct and indirect health effects, so it is important to note all of these in our literature report being presented to the community. Directly, trash and landfills attract bugs and other pests that can spread diseases to humans. Indirectly, the presence of trash can put stress on the mind and body, which can be a risk factor for mental health disorders such as anxiety and schizophrenia. Notably, this is the first time I’m citing research in APA instead of MLA, which is crazy considering I’m an incoming junior, but I am glad I am learning it now.

In more exciting news, our team met with Mike Halbfoerster at the Recycling Office at City Hall this week! We met to discuss their complaint map, the complaint process, as well as context and history for trash and recycling in Bethlehem. He offered many insights into the process of recycling, as well as the quite lengthy administrative processes that go into filing trash complaints. Importantly, he noted that there are not *more* complaints from the Southside when compared to the Northside, which is not what most people assume is the case. I also did not anticipate how long it took to handle trash complaints. It can take months for action to be taken that finally yields desired results. We also discussed taking a tour of the recycling facility in August. In all, it was interesting to compare the complaint map and the recycling map to the trash map.

The theme for the league check-in this week was essentially comparing our project to existing solutions, which was a good reminder of how our project and map will be uniquely helpful compared to what the city already has. This was definitely the most productive league meeting we have had thus far, as we had many audience questions. The main takeaway was that the student population knows next to nothing about the city’s trash and recycling policies. People had no clue the city did not do trash, they did not know that all the different companies had different pick up days, different rules, etc. I’m glad we were able to inform the small group, but it leaves me wondering how we can remedy this Lehigh specific issue in the future at a larger scale. Especially since students are huge contributors to trash in the Southside- informing them of the problem might go really far in remedying this aspect of the issue.

Shelby also had a fundraising event for the farm she works at this week, so I went with her and we did some community outreach in terms of making more residents aware of our project as she tabled for the farm. We continued this outreach as educators from a local community college were at Mountaintop meeting some of the project teams. We got some very helpful insights from them, such as a mapping software called CalTopo which we should definitely look into, as it had so many cool features such as background layering opacity, parcel IDS, and more- and is a free software for the basic version.

Lastly, we really got into preparation for our qualitative interviews for when the IRB gets approved (since the previous IRB work was just edits we had to make before submitting). This included going over our interview materials as well as researching different types of qualitative interview methods such as probing, the docent method, photomapping, go-alongs, etc.

Overall, this week was slower than previous weeks, but productive nonetheless! We wanted to do more walking audits this week but couldn’t, as the air quality has been bad again recently.