Science education and sustainability initiatives: A campus recycling case study shows the importance of opportunity

Instructors at Francis Marion University developed a recycling course in an attempt to satisfy the students’ goals of increasing campus awareness about sustainability and recycling, and the teachers’ goals of using problem‐based learning approaches in class. Students enrolled in the course designed their own experiment, completed the experiment and presented the results at several national meetings. The focal point of the experiment was student apartments, where some students were provided with recycling bins, some were not, and some were provided with both bins and education about the importance of recycling. Results show that students living in campus apartments significantly reduced their waste stream when given recycling bins and some education about recycling. Although ANOVA tests showed that while the presence of recycling education did not result in significantly more recycling, students who received bins (opportunity) recycled more as time went on. Positive student feedback indicated the success of using project‐based learning to teach sustainability.