Uh-oh! What Do We Do With Our E-waste?

Creating and Distributing Your Data-collection Survey

1. In order to collect data from each household about how much e-waste they generate and how they dispose of it, you'll need to create a data-collection survey. The next couple of steps will help you decide what to include in your survey. For more advice about creating good surveys, read the Science Buddies guide to Designing a Survey.
2. Decide which electronic devices you'd like to include in your survey. Here are a few possibilities to get you started: computers, televisions, cell phones, stereos, mp3 players, video game consoles, handheld video game machines, electronic toys, printers, fax machines, computer monitors.
3. Create a table, showing all of the devices and the various ways to dispose of them. Table 1 lists five possible outcomes for an electronic device, but you might be able to think of more.

4. Write a set of instructions asking the members of the household to please fill in the table.
   1. You might want to instruct them to all sit down together and fill out the form together to decrease the likelihood that people report an item more than once by accident.
   2. Define what each of the disposal scenarios means. For example:
      1. Thrown away: put in the normal garbage.
      2. Reused: given/sold to another person or charity for them to use, or taken apart in order to use some parts of it for another purpose.
      3. Recycled: returned to manufacturer for recycling or brought to an e-waste recycling center.
      4. Stored: sitting unused in a closet, garage, storage unit, or other location waiting for someone to do something about it.
      5. Unsure: don't remember how it was disposed of.
   3. It is a good idea to have someone read through your instructions and see if they are clear and easy to follow before you print your final version of the survey.
5. You can customize this science project any way you want! There might be additional questions you want to focus on and thus, additional data you need to collect using your survey. Read the Analyzing the Survey Data and Variations sections, before making the final version of your survey. Remember to:
   1. First, decide what your questions are. For example, "How long do people use each type of electrical device before disposing of it?"
   2. Second, come up with a hypothesis for each question based on your background reading, such as "On average, households will use a cell phone for two years before disposing of it, but use a television for 10 years before disposing of it."
   3. Third, list all the data you'll need to evaluate each hypothesis. For example, the amount of time each electrical device was used before it was disposed of.
   4. Fourth, check and make sure that your survey questions will result in answers for all the data on your list. For instance, you'd need to add a column to the table asking people to list approximately how long they'd owned each electronic device prior to disposing of it.
6. Using your survey, collect data from at least 10 households. A household includes all the people, related or not, who live together in a house or apartment. The more households you survey, the more representative of the typical household your data is likely to be. For a more complete explanation, see the Science Buddies guide to sample size.
   1. People you may be able to collect data from include: classmates, friends, parents' co-workers, extended family members, and neighbors.
   2. Avoid collecting data from households that have experienced major property damage from a catastrophic event, like a fire, flood, or tornado, within the past five years. These households might have had to dispose of and replace an unusually large number of electronic devices in a short period of time, thus skewing the results.
   3. Once you've decided from how many households you are going to collect data, print out as many copies of the survey as you'll need and distribute them. Make sure you also have a plan for when and how you'll collect the completed surveys.

Analyzing the Survey Data

The data you collect can be analyzed in many different ways. A few ways are described below, but you should continue to explore other questions and perform your own analyses. Some questions and hypotheses you think of might require you to collect additional data, so design your survey accordingly. Below are three questions you could explore and how to do so.

1. Across the households you surveyed, what is a typical household's most common method of disposing of an electronic device?
   1. For the first household, add up the number of devices that were disposed of in each manner. Record the data in a table, like Table 2 below, in your lab notebook.
   2. Repeat this for each household.
   3. At this point, you could sum (add up) the number of devices in each disposal category across all households, but some households might dispose of more electronic devices than others. To eliminate this bias in the data, convert your data into percentages.
      1. For the first household, sum the total number of electronic devices disposed of. Divide the number of electronic devices "thrown away" by the total number of devices disposed. Multiply by 100 to convert this into a percentage. Repeat the calculation for the other disposal methods.
      2. Repeat for all households.
   4. For each disposal method, average the percentages across all households. Create a pie chart to show your results. Which disposal method is the most common? Which is the least common?

2. Across the households you surveyed, what is the most likely fate of each electronic device?
   1. Take the first electronic device listed in your survey. Let's use "cell phone" as an example. Create a data table, like Table 3 below, showing how many cell phones were disposed of in each household in each manner.
   2. For each disposal method, sum (add) the number of cell phones across all households.
      1. For example, add the number of cell phones "thrown away" in household # 1 to the number of cell phones "thrown away" in households 2, 3, 4, and so on.
      2. Repeat for all disposal methods.
      3. Note: In step 1.c. of this section, the question was about the typical disposal methods of a household; for this reason, you had to be careful to not have any one household skew, or bias, the results. However, in this current cell phone example, the question is about what is the most likely fate of an individual cell phone. The fact that some households might dispose of more cell phones is relevant in this analysis. It is not a bias in this case and should not be removed.
   3. Convert the sums into percentages.
      1. For example, take the sum of cell phones that were "thrown away" and divide by the total number of cell phones disposed of using all the methods. Multiply by 100 to convert to percentages.
   4. Create a pie chart to visualize the results for cell phone disposal.
   5. Repeat the process for all the other electronic devices on your survey.

3. Which devices are most likely to be recycled? Which are least likely to be recycled?
   1. Using the data from step 2, make a bar chart with the percentage of devices recycled on the y-axis and each type of electronic device on the x-axis. There should be one bar for each electronic device.