A new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement audits a consolidated smoking shelter's falling butt-collection count against an independent campus-wide litter sweep, finding most of the decline never left the shelter's own bin.
An independent 14-month sweep finds the shelter's own count falling six times faster than the campus-wide total
A bin’s decline is easy to read as progress until you ask what it left out. We would rather publish the harder number than the flattering one.
— Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor, Impact Pathway Atlas, School of Continuous Improvement
Facilities consolidated the campus’s scattered outdoor smoking points into a single covered shelter last year, and the shelter’s own monthly tally of collected cigarette butts has fallen steadily ever since. A new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement set out to check what that tally was actually tracking.
The study set the shelter’s own collection record against an independently run litter count, kept to the same schedule but answerable to no dashboard, tracing collection figures across a full academic year and the term either side of it.
Over fourteen months, the shelter’s own log fell from 340 butts a month to 132, a decline of 61%. The independent sweep, covering the shelter and the six outdoor points it replaced, recorded a fall of only 9% over the same period, from 402 to 366.
“The interesting question isn’t whether the count fell — it did — but whose count we’d have believed if we hadn’t run the second one,” said Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of Demo Quarter, the poster’s co-author.
The University treats the gap between the two counts as exactly the kind of finding its evaluation-ecosystem agenda exists to surface, whichever count it happens to flatter.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.9a6na6.