Research Log

When I first started thinking about what I wanted to do my research paper on I thought something to do with the environment and being "green" would be interesting and relevant. From there I bounced between topics like carbon footprints, nuclear waste, oil spills, and finally landed on recycling. Here are a few sources I found for the other topics:

Carbon Footprints
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/datablog/2009/dec/07/copenhagen-climate-change-summit-carbon-emissions-data-country-world

• A lot of the other articles I was looking at about carbon footprints either were just merely defining   them or giving you a calculator to find out what your individual footprint was. I also couldn't really think of an argument that would be sufficient enough for an entire paper (or one that I found really interesting).

Nuclear Waste
http://www.epa.gov/radiation/docs/radwaste/
http://www.world-nuclear.org/education/wast.htm

• This topic is probably my second choice just because there is a lot about it that you can research and at least a couple of different angles you could come at this issue with. Not only that but I feel like this is something that a lot of people hear about but don't really spend a lot of time thinking about.

Oil Spills
http://www.epa.gov/oilspill/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/20/bp-oil-spill-study_n_972219.html

• One of the main reasons I didn't really think this would be a good topic (at least for me) is because of the recent events with BP and the oil spill in the Gulf. I figured while is was probably more than enough research, but that a lot of the arguments are probably over done, so I more or less passed.

Recycling
When I finally decided I wanted to research something about recycling I began brainstorming the many different facets of it. I thought about the typical pros and cons list, availability/presence, and the effectiveness vs cost of recycling as a whole. I decided I'd like to research the last topic (effectiveness of recycling) because it seemed the most interesting to me, and there is a lot there that I feel like people don't necessarily know.

Here are a few sources that helped shape my decision/I found might help me support my stance:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0921344993900062
http://www.mass.gov/dep/recycle/reduce/crbdrop.pdf
http://www.ilsr.org/recycling/recyclingmeansbusiness.html