Name: Hannah Huang

Social Justice Group: Microplastics (B)

Date of Fieldwork: January 10, 2025

Name of Organization and person (people) with whom you met and their title(s):

What I did and what I learned about my topic, activism, social justice work or civil and human rights work from this fieldwork:

On January 10th, 2025, Eliza, our science teacher who was our chaperone, Audrey, Xander, Fox, Taiyo, and I went to Washington Square Park to interview people about their knowledge of recycling and composting. Lots of people aren’t very aware of composting. It helps improve our soil, and how plants grow. Composting is good for our environment because it protects the climate by reducing methane emissions from landfills. So everybody should be composting because it will help our environment. After we got the data that we needed, we then made a Pi chart showing how many people know about composting and how many don’t.

We walked around Washington Square Park, asking random people what they knew about composting. In total, we asked 16 people. 60% did know about composting, and 40% didn’t. A few of the people we interviewed were college students at NYU, and they told us about how they composted at home. One of the people told us how she composted back in Seattle, would collect all of her food that she didn’t eat, and she would go to markets, or local composting areas and drop off her compost there. And a few of them were older and told us composting stories back in their days. We were denied by lots of people, but all we needed were just a few yes’ and no’s. We got 10 people who knew about composting, and 6 people who didn’t. So 62.5% know about composting, and 37.5% do not.
We came back with a lot of data, and since it was Xander’s birthday, we decided to take a pit stop at Molly’s Cupcakes and have a little birthday celebration for him with the 6 of us. Happy birthday Xander!