We finally
finished the final draft of our skit yesterday! We thought that we’d post our
idea here so other people could use some of the information for their own skit.
Since the theme
was to make an idea about how we could deal with trash, we decided to go see
what Canada was doing. Our mother was born in Canada, and she told us once
about the recycling program that Canada had when she was a child, so we thought
that’d we'd go and see how it had worked/ is working and to see if they even used
the same program.
It turned out
that they do, and we learned that it was a very helpful program. Our second
engineer and researcher, Tegan, looked up why it worked, and we found that it
worked because it was using the two things that most motivated people: losing
and gaining money.
The reason
money motivates people is because if you don’t have money, you likely don’t
have very much. Without money, you can’t buy food, water, a house, clothing, or
pay the taxes you need to keep a house. Without money you can’t afford to feed
your family, or have pets, or have a car. Without money, you can’t take a
vacation, afford tickets to concerts or plays, or afford many activities.
So, many people
view money as very important, and rightly so. For people who don’t have much
money, they tend to try and get it whenever the option comes up. And for
basically everyone…no one wants to lose money, unless their buying something
that would benefit them.
In Canada, they
use this to their advantage. Their program works very well, and because of it,
93% of their population recycles, which is huge, compared to America’s 53% of
people recycling.
If you take an
empty can of soda, an empty beer bottle, water bottle, soup can, or any other
type of can or bottle, than you get ten cents. To some people, that ten cents
doesn’t matter; they have enough money already and ten cents doesn’t seem very
important. However, to some people, ten cents adds up and can be very helpful.
It’s very rare
to find a can or bottle anywhere in Canada, because if anyone else sees it
first, it’s very likely that they’ll go and grab it so they can turn it in
later. The only place you might find a can or bottle are in dumpsters, and
people go as far as going “Dumpster Diving” just to see if they can find a can
or bottle to turn in.
This is a very
helpful program, to people and the environment alike. Using this program alone,
a girl named Sonila Ranaweera managed to collect 46,000 pounds of recycables and
turn them in, earning 46,000 dollars to donate to different charities.
The other
program they have relies on taking money. In Canada, you can only have two bags
of trash. Recycling is free and they will take your bags of recalls no matter
what, but if you too many trash bags, they will leave them. This encourages
people to recycle as much as they possibly can.
If you want your extra trash bags to be taken, you have to pay a fee by buying a special tag that lets the garbage people know that you paid a fee for it and it is allowed to be taken to the dump.
We figured it
was an interesting idea, and it’s obviously a good one. I hope this helps you
with your skit or project. J
