Fall 2020 Sustainability Fellows: Jacob Doty

Project: Create a Digital Inventory of Campus Waste Infrastructure

Partner: FSU Grounds

Program: First Year Graduate Student in GIS

Jacob is a first year graduate student looking towards a future career in GIS. In his second semester as a Sustainability Fellow, Jacob continued his original project with FSU Grounds.

Florida State University offers recycling services at many locations across campus. However, the recycling infrastructure has not been inventoried and included in the Sustainability section of the interactive campus map. Therefore, the goal of the project was to map recycling availability on campus and make the data more accessible.

Demonstrating incredible commitment and perseverance, Jacob utilized specialized equipment and mapping software to collect data on 927 waste bins dispersed across the FSU campus. Jacob used the GNSS app and Trimble to accurately pin-point bin locations and recorded his findings on ArcGIS Online.

In addition to providing the location of bins, Jacob also collected information related to bin type, waste stream, commodity, and service frequency. Jacob provided preliminary analysis using buffering and nearest neighbor tools in ArcGIS Online.

“Just walking around campus, I’ve explored places I’ve never had to walk down before and paths I didn’t know were there,” said Jacob. “The biggest thing I learned through this process was the huge scope of recycling and waste management. Before the project, if you would have asked me how many bins I thought were on campus, I would have vastly underestimated the numbers. Waste management is something that’s often put on the backburner and not really thought about in the forefront of people’s minds. And this project opened my eyes to all of that.”

Jacob’s data will be added to the online campus map, which is accessible to the public. The FSU Grounds team expects that the data will be helpful in addressing customer service suggestions throughout the year.

“With all the things Jacob had to adapt to, he really stuck with the project and made it work,” said Elizabeth Swiman, Sustainable Campus Director. “This has been a project we’ve been talking about for a long time, and finally being able to actually visualize it is fantastic. Jacob was truly professional in every way.”

To view Jacob's Recycling and Trash GIS layers, visit map.concept3d.com. 

To learn more about the Sustainability Fellows program, visit sustainablecampus.fsu.edu/sustainability-fellows. 

Project scope

Preliminary analyses