Kyle Martin
Geography 125
Service Learning Project
Verbal Component
The Service Learning project is one of the main components in the Geography 125 class
at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and it is worth forty percent of our grade. This means
that as a student, you need to do well on this project or be prepared to take it over again.
When it was my time to choose which Service Learning community partner, to so to say “work
for”, I decided to become part of The Wisconsin BE SMART Conversation Challenge.
When I met with the reprehensive for the BE SMART Coalition they told me that this
was a do-it-yourself service learning project and when I found this out I felt that I would do a
very good job because I feel that I can brainstorm and work better alone. But when it came to
doing the entire project it would take a lot more people to really make an impact. When I was
brainstorming I came up with many different ways that I could better the environment from my
college dorm room to my home in Saukville, Wisconsin. The very first thing that I came up with
that would help out the world came to me when I was sitting on the toilet. I know this might
sound weird but, I thought that I would involve my suitemates into my little project. I decided
to post a note above the toilet that said and I quote, “If it’s yellow let it mellow, and if it’s
brown flush it down. I am doing a project to find ways to better the environment… so let’s save
water!” When I posted this I really noticed that our flush to bathroom use ratio was less than
what it was prior to the sign. Another thing that I noticed was in one of my friend’s suites they
had a water saving flusher installed in to their bathroom over Christmas break. This new device
was mad to save water when you flush and it also can sense when you are going number one or
number two. When I saw this I was very impressed because this new technology, if installed in
all bathrooms in the Sandberg dorms and in Riverview, would end up costing the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee a bit of money but it would really save on how much water that would be
wasted. Another thing that I was working on was my shower time; this would be hard for me
because I love the feeling of hot water on the back of my neck. But with the help of my
roommate I really cut down on the amount of water that I was using in the shower. I would
brush my teeth before I would get into the shower, then as soon and my roommate hear the
shower turn on he would be looking at the clock every minute. This lead to my roommate
opening the door and screaming at me to get out. At first, this was hard for me because I was
so used to just sitting in the shower as long as I wanted. But in the long run I started to do it to
my roommate so we were doubling the amount of water we were saving. We were had an
average shower time of about five minutes, this included shampoo and body wash. I really
found that this was saving a lot of water for our suite but to do it for the entire Sandburg dorms
would be damn near impossible, unless a timer was installed but still that wouldn’t happen,
because of the amount of female students that live in all four of the Sandburg towers. Being a
male, this experiment was easy for me but if I were to be female this would be far more difficult
because all males know that women have a lot longer hair and they need to do their things(
shampoo, conditioner, shave, loofa, and whatever else they do). This saving on water will really
help out the Lake Michigan watershed because the university uses a lot of water with many
different things which include agricultural, fountains, laundry, and bubblers. One of the top
water consumers on the UWM campus is the agricultural part of the university. This consists of
watering the school grounds (grass, flowers) and the agricultural department. I am aware of a
specific class called Plants in your life which includes a lab that uses lot of water because for this
class you will be growing our own plants; this is just an example of how the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee is over using water. They could fix this problem by instead of watering
the university grounds a couple times a day, cut it down to once a day or even wait a day and
water it twice every two days. This would make water use at UWM a lot less waist full and
would save more water for drinking and cut down on runoffs/sewage.
Another thing that I did to try to better the environment was that I would always drink
a lot of caned soda so I decided to not just stop drinking soda but to start buying two liter
bottles of soda. When I did this I noticed that I was finding myself not taking the garbage out so
much. I would sometimes use cups from the café or Palms (a late hour’s restaurant in Sandburg
dorms) but I would mainly use cups that I brought from home or that I have received from the
university. When seeing how much I have reduced my trash output I thought that I would reuse
water bottles, after seeing my roommate doing it all the time I thought this would be a great
way to improve my project. But one thing that was still increasing in my garbage was our spiter
(a bottle that a chewer spits his tobacco spit into, which on average would fill up in three days).
So my roommate and I decided to come up with a way to try to cut down on the amount of
bottle/paper cups that we would throw away due to being a spiter. We came up with a great
conclusion, we would go and purchase the large thirty-two ounce Gatorade bottles and drink
the Gatorade of course, and use those big bottles as a spiter because they would take longer to
fill up (on average, the thirty-two ounce bottle take up to eight or nine days) and when we were
finish we would dump the thirty-two ounces of chew spit in to the number one filled toilet and
rinse out the bottle and end up using it another two to three times. When evaluating our new
advancement in spiter technology we noticed that we were taking our garbage out once every
week and a half. Mind you, that this was only one garbage can when a standard Sandburg south
tower dorm room only comes with two and we had three from me bring one from home. It’s
also reducing the amount of plastic garbage bags that we, as a room, are using which means a
very small amount of plastic won’t be in a landfill for the rest of eternity. Just think that if urban
Milwaukee would start to use biodegradable garbage bags it would really reduce the amount of
pollution that would clog up the society. But there is a catch, these bags would have to be
cheaper and stronger than the higher end garbage bags because the new garbage bags have
this new technology that doesn’t make them rip but if you think about it, if you would just put
less garbage in to the bag it would end up ripping. In the long run being more environmentally
friendly all because of a cheap biodegradable garbage bag will let our planet live for even
longer. I really noticed that just by switching to a two liter bottle instead of cans or using a
cheap biodegradable garbage bag we were finding new ways to reduce the amount of trash
that our fourteenth floor dorm room was producing.
There were two topics that were tuff to try to reduce the amount of garbage/water that
we used. Both of these were the two snags that I ran into when doing the first two ways of
bettering the environment. These problems were how to reduce the amount of water that we
use when doing laundry and how to be more environmentally friendly when we are out
drinking. With the first problem, how to reduce the amount of laundry loads your do, there
was a lot of thinking that I had to do to try to figure out a solution. But after about an hour, I
finally came up with a solution to the first problem, buy more clothes! I know that it would cost
more money but it would allow a person to do smaller load every week because of the amount
of clothes that the person has. But the person would have to kind of “split” their clothes and
wear the clothes that they put in a pile for week one and week two and when the person would
run out then they would do a single load of laundry instead of waiting two or so weeks until
they had no clothes and having to do about four to five loads of laundry. And in this method it
would end up saving water because it would be a small load of water instead of several loads. If
every student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee would do this system, even though it is
a small percentage, it would really reduce the amount of water that would be used. The other
topic that I had a hard time trying to figuring how to be environmentally friendly was when my
friends and I would do a little drinking. The thing is, sometimes we would drink in the dorms or
we would go to parties. When we would drink in the dorms we would either get a bottle of
hard alcohol or a cube of beer and those were both very easy to recycle in the dorms because
we could sneak it into the garbage room on our floor and the janitor lady would come pick it up
and put it into the recycling dumpster. But if we were at a party it would be a lot harder, we
would drink a couple beers at a friend’s house and just throw them into a waste basket and
that would be the last I would see of them. So I decided to go over to my friend’s house after he
had a party the previous night and I proceeded to help him clean up and I made sure that all the
beer cans were put in to the recycling bin that was in the garage. When I took the cans out I
noticed that the City of Milwaukee has issued special garbage cans. One is all green just for
garbage and one is green with a yellow lid and it stated on the top of the can, “Recycling Only”
when I saw this I was impressed on how the city is trying to encourage recycling. When thinking
in the big realm of things I thought to myself if Milwaukee does this then I’m sure that even
bigger cities like New York, Atlanta, and Washington DC are doing the same but even better.
The United States is doing a pretty good job with trash in the cities when I travel to different
states, other than Wisconsin, I notice that there are many trash receptacles on ever street. This
is good to see because it shows that the governments of these states aren’t wasting money.
When doing this Service Learning project I really found many ways to improve the
environment now matter how big or small they are, every little thing counts when you are
dealing the fragile thing we call our world. I will continue to try to do my little part in saving the
environment by not littering, saving water, and reusing our resources that would otherwise rot
in a land fill forever, this trick is to get ever body else to have the same state of mind.
Non Verbal Component
Getting Yelled at to get out of the Shower
Reusing Water Bottles
Reusing Paper Cups from the Cafe
My Bathroom Sign