Week two of Theo's internship with Sustainable Princeton

For the second week of my summer internship at Sustainable Princeton I’ve been continuing my work on the effort to update the Municipality of Princeton’s Sustainable Jersey certification. After completing my work on calculating the emissions released by the Municipality of Princeton’s fleet of vehicles, as well as the average fuel efficiency and annual fuel usage of the vehicles last week, this past Thursday I completed my calculations on the emissions released by the Municipality of Princeton’s fleet of vehicles in terms of CO2, N20, and CH4. Upon its completion, I sat down with the program director of Sustainable Princeton Christine and we planned out our first moves with regards to improving the plastic bag and wrapping waste diversion program called Bring your own Bag or BYOB that Sustainable Princeton runs in conjunction with the Princeton Merchants Association.

               This past Friday I attended a Princeton University Environmental Institute panel that was open to the public on how to feed a growing population sustainably so as to take notes and see if anything I learned there could be used to help improve one of Sustainable Princeton’s programs. The event itself was called “Changing Climate, Changing Appetites”. This program was really interesting and not only did I learn a lot that can hopefully help Sustainable Princeton and myself but I also acquired copies of their presentations so that both myself and Sustainable Princeton can review them.

I’m really excited about next week as after a week’s delay I will finally be able to liaise with the Princeton merchant association and the local grocery store McCaffreys to help local businesses divert their plastic waste in the form of plastic bags and plastic shipping materials from the landfills to a recycling program. This is because McCaffreys is taking all this plastic to be recycled for free!