Rivalry week

November 12, 2010

Rivalry week the tension was high the anticipation was sky rocketing this was the last game between in-state rivals. The vandal fans came four hours early to the game they brought their beer, liquor, and bbqs they were here to tailgate. The atmosphere was great vandal nation was in attendance in a big way the trash was everywhere and the recycling containers were full on the biggest event of the fall. There were a lot of hard alcohol caps fund this weekend and we even found plastic containers that held jello shots. Indeed, vandal’s nation was inebriated in a big way. The artifacts were more plentiful than any other collection. This rivalry was an interesting event because the amount of trash was outstanding more so than any other game.

-Joe

The Last Vuvuzela Goes Silent



The beer mug flag has lowered, the Vamulance has gone home, and the last noise maker has quieted for another year the collection of zone 8 has come to an end.  The final collection for us was sadly anti-climatic.  It was supposed  to be after the San Jose State University game on the 4th of December, but it snowed so much we were unable to collect the next day.  This may have been a unexciting way to end the semester for zone 8 but considering how many interesting, and unexpected things happened during the rest of the collection it seemed to fit.  The total number of artifacts found, has reached over 3000 now and still growing.  With the majority of the data collection being Cigarette butts, glass shards, and beer bottle caps, it is safe to say that people are enjoying them selves at the games quite throughly.

The observation part of the project was actually my favorite part of the entire project, and one of the more interesting parts of the observation portion was seeing how the sustainability center developed over time.  They were constantly trying out new ways  to improve their ability to collect recyclable materials during and after the game.   One of their more successful adjustments was to put three recycling bins with people manging them up close to the entrance of the Kibbie Doom.  So that when people would go to the game they could put the recyclable materials in them instead of in the trash or one the ground.  These are two photos of the same trash can the one on the top is before they implemented this placement of recycling bins the one on the bottom is after words.

Just in case you can’t tell the top one is completely over flowing with garbage, (people were playing trash Tetris in an attempt to “not litter”  for 5 to 10 seconds each, but were still unwilling to walk the 30 feet to another trash can), the one on the bottom does have some recyclable materials on it but it is still way better off.  All in all the collection was a long interesting and great experience, this is zone 8 singing off.

Kyle Parker-McGlynn

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor flood… well, maybe snow.

Collection and cataloguing of artifacts from Zone 8 have faced a multitude of challenges including rain, smell, flood, snow, and quanitity. Every time our group has gone out to collect artifacts from the five designated areas it has rained. Smell relegated the artifacts from the lab to closets in their final stages of drying (let’s face it – wet, smelly trash in a room just makes a smelly room). The week during Thanksgiving break the anthropology building experienced a flood of relatively epic proportions; water from a burst pipe on the roof cascaded from ceilings, walls, down stairs and onto floors. Whoops. Luckily a few group members were still around to rescue drying collections. The final collections could not be completed due to the accumulated fourteen inches of snow in the Kibbie Dome parking lot.

The biggest challenge has been in the management of the quantity of artifacts collected. We have close to 2,000 items in the Zone 8 collection. While this is great for statistical analysis, the sheer volume of fragments is a challenge. We suggest that future studies of this area utilize minimal collection methods, including random sampling and in-field data recording. Additional observations of material depostion by tailgating participants would be more helpful to the campus Sustainability Center in their efforts to identify behavioral patterns and locations for recycling receptacles.

Know we know.

- MPG