Abstract
My study was created to see if the proportion of
recycling in Cleveland,
Ohio
was significantly lower than the proportion of recycling in Portland, Oregon.
On the website,
http://www.dorsetforyou.com/index.jsp?articleid=387050, I have found that the
recycling centers in Portland,
Oregon show an average recycling
rate of 70%. Before doing my study, I did background research on
previous recycling studies. I found many studies on recycling, such as:
significance tests to see how different programs affected amount of
recycling, a significance test to analyze how an implemented program
affected Wisconsin’s
residential recycling, a study to measure the resources saved through
recycling, and a study to assess different factors associated with
recycling and recycling rates for different ages and genders. When
conducting my study, I called each recycling center and had them randomly
ask 10 people at the 31 different centers in the city of Cleveland if they recycle
all of their recyclable materials at home. Two of the 33 recycling
centers that I randomly selected to sample from were disconnected or no
longer in business. The data that I collected showed an average
recycling rate of 173 out of 310 people, or 55.8%, for everyone asked
at each center combined. When I ran a one proportion z-test on the data
that I collected, I obtained a p-value of 0, so I rejected the null
hypothesis that the proportion of Cleveland’s recycling is equal to 0.7,
accepting the alternative hypothesis that the proportion of Cleveland’s
recycling is less than 0.7. I
was still surprised, yet pleased, to see that my sample of
Cleveland
recycling centers showed a rate of over 50%.