Monica Long

A4
Littering Statistics
For my math project, I decided to research about littering. I stopped littering when I was
in 8th grade and have never littered or supported littering since. I am a firm believer in a clean
environment, not only for our own benefit, but as well as for the oceans and sea creatures, and all
other organisms that are affected by littering. Yearly, about 1 million birds, and 100,000+ marine
animals die due to entanglement or ingestion of litter; our water is becoming too toxic for Earths
creatures to even live in anymore. In the Pacific alone, there are islands of trash, two times the
size of Texas, that are freely floating in the middle of the ocean, because of littering. Not only
does it kill off and harm our oceans and their creatures, but it is just outright nasty. Litter is full
of germs and helps produce bacteria, it could also carry diseases that will be passed around if
ingested by an animal or a person. Because of this deep and heart changing information, I wanted
to see how many of my peers in my classroom litter; how often they had littered in the last week,
and if they really know just what kind of outcomes they are contributing to.
I took a random sample from about 20 of my peers from school and recorded my
findings. I asked each person how many times they had littered within the last week and it
resulted in some very interesting and varying answers. From my research and a little bit of
internet research, it was apparent that the male species is more likely to litter than the female
species. My survey was randomized, except it was biased on the fact that the people I sampled
were all around the same age group. The amount of time it took to complete my survey wasnt
very long or very difficult at all, only taking me about 30 minutes to collect my data and create a
histogram out of it. It was interesting to get my findings and see what kind of answers I got form

what type of people I asked. It was kind of predictable because I felt like I already knew who
would give me a response of 15 and who would give me a response of two just by who they
were. My data jumps around a lot, making it an unreliable source of information if generalizing
and applying my data to lets say, the entire school, or all teens in the United States. After
collecting and analyzing my information, I found the mean, median, mode, and standard
deviation. The mean was 1.5, the median being 1, the mode also being 1, and a standard
deviation of 3.78. Thus, telling me that on average, from my sample, my peers litter about 1.5
times per week, it also shows that the center of the data, the median, is sitting at one, which isnt
very far from the mean. The mode told me that most of my responses were a one, and that my
S.D. was 3.78. From my data collection, I can tell that this survey is not a normal distribution.
There are a lot of outliers in my data, as well as a few humps in my histogram, meaning it is not
unimodal. My histogram is also not symmetric in any way, or by any means.
Doing this project really showed me what type of people truly care about our
environment and who doesnt care at all. I had several people tell me that they had not littered
whatsoever within the last week, while others told me that they had littered 15+ times within the
last week; sad, right? It really showed me the type of changes that need to be made within our
community in order to maintain a healthy and stable Earth. If I wanted to further my
investigation I would start by researching about littering within Utah or SLC. I would then find
ways to help reduce or lessen the amount of litter. I would also try to promote the stop of littering
within schools, work, businesses, homes and other places that are visited often. In fact, it would
be a great senior project to do for next year. Overall, I think I did really well on my project. It is
something I am passionate about, so it was really interesting for me to look into and research. I
think I deserve to be graded with an A for this project because I fulfilled all the needed

requirements, along with a lengthy and superior essay reporting and explaining all of my
research. It is very important to me that our community looks toward reducing the amount of
litter in our world so we can live better and all of our neighbors can too.