By Lauren McSherry
 Above, a mess was left in the wake of recycling pickup earlier this year on Estate Drive in Los Altos. |
When Brij Singh moved to Los Altos from Sunnyvale, he noticed that something was different: Los Altos had more trash on its streets than the other city.
When his teacher Mrs. Loughmiller assigned her third-grade students a science project for Oak Elementary School’s annual science fair, Brij already had a project in mind.
“It was obvious to him that there was a big difference in the quality of (recycling) pickup,” said Brij’s father, Dr. Tej Singh. “Brij said, ‘Why don’t we compare the two cities?’ … There was a staggering difference between the two.”
Brij kept his idea almost entirely to himself, sharing it only with his teacher and his father, whose assistance was required to accomplish part of it.
“It was top secret,” Brij said.
To carry out the project, father and son took to the streets, with Tej driving and Brij counting the amount of trash that either escaped Los Altos’ open-top recycling bins or remained in the bins after being dumped. They did the same in Sunnyvale, which uses closed-top bins.
The 8-year-old hypothesized that Sunnyvale had cleaner streets because of its closed-top bins that are picked up and dumped by an automated machine. Los Altos recycling is dumped by hand.
Tej and Brij followed recycling trucks on pickup routes throughout Sunnyvale and Los Altos, stopping at about 50 houses in each city.
The results were surprising: The amount of recyclables left in the street after pickup in Los Altos was four times higher than in Sunnyvale. On average, 1.2 pieces of trash were left in front of homes in Los Altos. In Sunnyvale the average was 0.3.
Tej believes the project has larger ramifications.
“This is a topic which when we talk to our neighbors, they think is a problem,” he said. “Maybe we need to get updated with the rest of the cities in Northern California.”
Now that his project is complete, Brij is focusing his energies on playing Little League and ice-skating once a week. But he has a new idea in the works, one that isn’t so top secret: He wants to present his project to the city council.
“I want to change the bins so that we won’t have a polluted city,” Brij said. “I think it could really change the city.”
