Interviews and Analysis

This week I worked on conducting interviews of the Market Place staff. I was able to talk to two different cashiers about their direct involvement in the process, and a Market Place supervisor as a means of getting a more general view of how the program is working as a whole. I was able to get some really valuable input from these interviews. I learned that the computer system that we use to check people out is perfectly capable of being programed so that the checking in/out of containers could somehow be attached to an individual's account. This would eliminate the need for tokens and would solve the problem of frequently losing them. All three staff members, however, said that the program seems to be running very smoothly and they don't have any complaints, aside from suggesting the use of id cards instead of tokens. Once I finished the interviews, I started working on analyzing all of the information that I have gathered, and creating a report to present to Campus Dining with possible suggestions and improvements. One idea that I have come up with is making more use of technology in the whole system. This would include putting an indication of your enrollment in the program on your account. The other big idea that I had was making use of a scanner to check containers in and back out, which would allow students to put their containers on the conveyor belt to be washed by the school, instead of having to wash it themselves, and would solve the problem of cleaning the containers before returning them. The scanner would be mounted on the wall next to the tray conveyor belt. Under this system, students would bring back a dirty container, scan it in, then place it on the conveyor belt. Then, the next time they want food to go, they go to a cashier, who would have a stack of clean containers. The cashier would scan the container out and then the student would go get food. There are definitely still kinks in this system because we would need the scanners to be able to either communicate with each other, or if we used id cards, be able to keep track of which containers are in and which ones are out. The other problem with this system is that we would need to have all of the containers printed with a barcode. Next week I will continue researching possible solutions and working on my report.

Survey Results

The Eco-Clamshell program evaluation surveys went out one week from today and there has been a great response. I have received over 100 completed surveys from currently enrolled program members. The responses to the other two surveys (people who signed up but never enrolled, and people not at all involved in the program) are surprisingly low. I expected a very low number of responses from the people not involved in the program, but for some reason, I received a greater number of responses from uninvolved people, than I did from people who were initially signed up, but never enrolled. I only received 3 responses from the unenrolled people and 16 from the uninvolved people. This week I have been working on reading through the survey responses and the huge number of comments and suggestions. I have identified a few reoccuring problems that have been mentioned in several of the survey responses.

The main problems are :

-Cleaning the containers before returning them

-Losing/forgetting the tokens

-Problems getting or returning a container during crowded times

The most mentioned problem was the problem of having to wash the containers before returning them for a token. This issue is not just a problem of convenience, but it is also a problem with facilities. Many of the residence halls are not equipped with sinks that can handle food disposal. This issue has also been mentioned by faculty in the program. They also don't have an appropriate place to wash their containers. As mentioned in a previous post, there does not seem to be an easy way to fix this problem until the program is open to the whole campus. I intend to research the systems used by other schools to try to help find a solution to this problem that I can propose to Campus Dining.