Multimedia Reporting (Adler-Noland)

The University of Kansas men's basketball team had secured its win against the University of Colorado long before scoring its 97th point. But one Jayhawk fan still felt anxious waiting for the game's final minutes to tick away.

"I didn't realize how many points KU could score," said Jamie Bossert, owner of Jersey Mike's Subs in Lawrence. "It made me nervous."

The Kansas versus Colorado match on January 27 was the debut of Jersey Mike's promotion for men's home basketball games, which takes 10 cents off any sub for each point the Jayhawks score over 50.

With the final score of 97 to 74, customers received a discount of $4.70 if they showed a KU student ID or ticket stub from the game. Bossert said regular sandwiches range in price from $4.95 to $6.25.

"People basically get a free sandwich," Bossert said. "We lose money on it."

Though costly in the short-term, offers like Jersey Mike's give a boost to sales by gaining fans' goodwill and getting them talking.

"It's a win for them," said Denise Linville, associate professor of journalism who specializes in marketing. "It creates buzz and gets people talking about their brand. They're hoping to have some type of association with the excitement and fun of KU basketball."

Jersey Mike's discount lasted for one week, and Bossert said it brought in more business than usual, with about 80 customers using the discount by its sixth day.

Linville said she believes discounts like Jersey Mike's are more effective at getting people into a store than running a print ad or buying ad space inside Allen Fieldhouse. She referred to Jersey Mike's discounted sandwiches as a loss leader: although the business loses money on sandwiches, it gains complementary sales like chips and drinks.

"There's a psychological principle there," Linville said. "A lot of people donít feel right just getting something for free."

Ashley Durkee, Manhattan junior, had never been to Jersey Mike's, but went after hearing about the promotion from a friend. She bought chips and a drink with her discounted sandwich because she felt bad paying less than a dollar for the sub.

"I felt guilty," Durkee said. "Especially because I didn't even have to go to the game to get the discount."

Linville said that although a promotion like Jersey Mike's costs a business money in the short-term, it puts the company in a favorable light in customers' minds, which likely increases future sales.

Jason Hupp, manager of Advanced Auto Parts on 6th Street, said the "Clean the Glass" promotion that his business does at men's basketball games is successful in bringing in future sales. If the team snatches 40 rebounds during a home game, fans receive a free gallon of wiper fluid at Advanced Auto Parts by showing a KU student ID or ticket stub from the game.

"People come in and just get the wiper fluid, but then come back when they need something else," Hupp said.

The "Clean the Glass" promotion has made Advanced Auto Parts a well-known presence in Lawrence. Hupp said that wiper fluid regularly costs 98 cents a gallon, and about 50 to 75 people come in for wiper fluid per game, though word of the promotion reaches over 16,000 people in Allen Fieldhouse.

Jamie Woods, sports marketing manager for Advanced Auto Parts, said the company does its "Clean the Glass" promotion for six other college basketball teams, and does similar promotions for college football teams, minor league baseball teams and minor league hockey teams.

Sports fans are an especially loyal market according to Max Utsler, associate professor of journalism who teaches Sports, Media and Society. Initially losing money by offering a discount can end up being advantageous for businesses if in return they gain sports' fans loyalty.

"It's a very popular thing to do at sporting events," Utsler said. "You're not going to see a promotion like this for who's voted into the House of Representatives."

Utsler said the Kansas City Royals' "Krispy Kreme Dozen for a Dozen" promotion is an example of effective sports marketing through offering free or discounted products.

"I thought it was one of the smartest things to do," he said. "They should've done it at every ballpark in the country."

For four seasons, whenever the Royals batted 12 hits on their home field, fans could redeem their ticket stub for a dozen Krispy Kreme glazed doughnuts. The Royals reached the 12-hit mark during 80 home games over the four years, which Utsler said is about as often as most other major league baseball teams.

"Once it got rolling, it gained a kind of pop culture attraction," Utsler said.

Fans would begin chanting for doughnuts after the eleventh hit, and a giant pulsing doughnut would appear on the JumboTron each time a batter stepped up to the plate. The Kansas City Star ran a photo of Royals fans cashing in their ticket stubs for Krispy Kreme doughnuts on an August 2003 cover page.

"You can't buy coverage like that," Utsler said.

Despite the heavy exposure, Royals president Dan Glass announced January 19 that the promotion would not continue for the Royals' 2007 season.

"It completely baffled me," Utsler said. "I think the Royals were surprised, too."

If the promotion was hurting Krispy Kreme financially, Utsler said the solution would have been to restrict the times and the locations where fans could collect the doughnuts, or to raise the number of hits required for the promotion to take effect.

Bossert of Jersey Mike's did exactly that. Instead of 40 points, the discount now begins after the Jayhawks score 60. Instead of a one-week promotion, the discount is now good for two days.

The promotion has become more popular despite the new stipulations. In the two days following the Jayhawks' win over Kansas State on February 7 -- once again with a score of 97 -- Bossert said about 100 customers used the $3.70 discount, over triple the number of customers per day from the first discount.

"I knew the high score was a good thing because we were going to have a lot of people in here," Bossert said. "And we believe that if someone tries our food, they'll come back."

Moldy walls, backed up drains and a broken heating system are just a few of the problems Rebecca Palmer has encountered in three years of renting a house just south of campus on Emerald Drive.

“A lot of stuff was wrong with the house before we moved in,” Palmer said. “It was supposed to be fixed shortly after we moved in, but never was.”

Despite the disrepair, Palmer and her three roommates are satisfied with the house because of its convenient location and low cost. She said a professional inspection of the property might prompt their landlord to make improvements and could have alerted them to problems ahead of time.

“A lot of students are moving into their own places for the first time, so they don't know what to look out for,” Palmer said.

Students scouting out off-campus living arrangements for next year may soon be getting a little help from the city in making sure their places are up to par.

The Lawrence Association of Neighborhoods (LAN) is proposing that the city expand its rental registration program to include multi-family units like apartment complexes, duplexes and student-rented homes. Landlords would pay an annual $25 fee per rental to have the inside of each rental inspected for neglect and safety hazards every three years.

“Many times the property is not livable, but the landlords still rent at an exorbitant rent,” said LAN president Gwen Klingenberg. “The price of rental property in the community is above the average scale. Renting sub-standard housing at all let alone at unacceptable rents should be a concern to all students.”

Klingenberg said landlords’ charging high rent for low-quality housing is a problem throughout Lawrence, but that it is most apparent in areas near campus like the Oread neighborhood. Located just east of campus, homes in Oread can be rented to students at high prices and without proper upkeep because of the properties’ location.

Lawrence has had rental registration for all single-family units since February 2002. A single-family unit is a detached dwelling in an area zoned for no more than 11 living units per one acre space. Multi-family units include apartment complexes, duplexes and other housing structures in areas zoned for 12 to 32 units per acre.

“I don’t think it makes much sense to have it for single-family rentals and not multi-family,” said LAN member Candice Davis, citing a report by Neighborhood Resources Director Victor Torres. The report said about 85 to 90 percent of maintenance complaints phoned in to the department came from multi-family units.

In January, Davis sent a letter to City Manager Dave Corliss suggesting that the city expand its rental registration program to include all rental units.

“The goal of the program is to keep properties at some minimal standard and to protect tenants,” Davis said. “Just inspecting the outside of multi-family rentals isn’t enough.”

All rental units are currently inspected for external damage by the fire department and gas company. In multi-family units, responsibility then falls on the renter to report any internal disrepair to Neighborhood Resources.

Brian Jimenez, code enforcement manager for the city of Lawrence, said the city’s high number of student renters called for required internal inspections of all rental property.

“When you’re dealing with a college town, it’s a unique situation,” Jimenez said. “Typically you have a different tenant every year and people may not call us for an inspection because they’re moving on, so then it will be the next person’s problem. If it’s the right location or rent, there will still be someone to rent it.”

Jimenez said expanding the rental registration program would be a positive step for both tenants and landlords.

“We have a lot of absentee landlords in this town,” Jimenez said. “Landlords will benefit from it because it creates a system that holds every landlord to the same standards.”

Landlord James Dunn rents several of his properties to KU students, and said that forgoing some maintenance allowed him to offer his rentals at lower prices for students.

“If the rents are fixed and all other things like property tax are increased, the only thing to cut back on is maintenance,” Dunn said. “Students are willing to compromise a lot of things for cheap rent.”

Dunn said he would have to raise tenants’ rent to cover the $25 registration fee if the city commission approved multi-family rental registration. Dunn was opposed to the forced inspections because they would violate tenants’ privacy. He said the current procedure for inspecting the inside of rentals adequately protected tenants.

“It’s been working for many years now,” Dunn said. “The onus is on the resident to want the property inspected. Society has to trust that an individual can tell if there’s a problem.”

Davis said relying on a tenant to report poor maintenance was ineffective and unfair to the tenant.

“It puts the person who’s complaining in an adversarial relationship with the landlord,” Davis said. “It could affect the person’s deposit and their stay there.”

To accommodate tenants’ privacy, Davis said that inspections could be conducted before tenants moved in or after they moved out.

Lawrence’s expanded rental registration program would model the Unified Government of Wyandotte County’s rental inspection program. The county has four inspectors who manage about 16,500 properties. Single-family units are inspected every five years and multi-family units are inspected every three years. The extensiveness of inspections is based on the number of rental units per acre. Each unit is inspected if an acre has fewer than five units. If an acre has five to 10 units, 50 percent are inspected, and 25 percent of the units are inspected if more than 10 units are on one acre.

According to a report by Neighborhood Resources Director Victor Torres, Lawrence has 12,375 multi-family rental units in Lawrence. The required $25 fee for each unit would generate $309,375 to go toward 4,125 multi-family unit inspections per year. If properties are inspected 100 percent, the city would hire four inspectors, and if properties are inspected on a percentage basis like Wyandotte County, the city would hire three inspectors. Davis said that overall, the expanded rental registration program would pay for itself.

LAN hoped to have the expansion of the program on the city commission agenda by March 27, which is the last meeting of the current commission before elections on April 3.

“They can’t implement it tomorrow, but we’d like to see some agreement that this is the direction they want to go,” Davis said. “A landlord has a business, and it should be held to certain standards just like any other business.”

One version of Mariel Alfaro’s life exists in foster care files scattered across the state of Kansas. The pages profile a defiant child, prone to violent outbursts and running away. The girl on paper seems destined for life in prison or a string of dead-end jobs.

She’s out of place. Broken.

But this picture is far from accurate.

Fresh from a British literature test on a Friday afternoon, the 21-year-old University of Kansas junior crosses Jayhawk Boulevard amid the noon bustle, keeping pace with the rushing crowd. Wearing a navy sweatshirt, sneakers and torn jeans with her long black hair resting on shoulders hunched beneath a backpack, the outspoken, petite Latina looks every bit the college student.

She belongs.

“If I wanted life to be sweet, it was going to be my decision and all my doing,” Mariel says. “Life is one percent what happens to you, 99 percent how you react to it.”

According to a 2006 study through Casey Family Programs in Seattle, 20,000 to 25,000 kids leave foster care programs in the United States each year, most at ages 17 or 18. The study found that only three percent of these children go on to complete college by age 24, compared with 28 percent of children from traditional-family homes.

“While many of these foster care alumni wanted to enroll in college and, in fact, did so, their drop-out rates were tremendously high,” said Peter Pecora, senior director of research services at Casey Family Programs.

Pecora cited education gaps from too many school changes, untreated depression and lack of financial resources as reasons why college is tougher for children raised in foster homes.

For Mariel, the lack of emotional support is the most difficult.

“I don’t have anyone I can count on for motivation to do this, and that’s been a hard realization,” she says.

Mariel recounts her life from inside her black 2004 Dodge Dakota. Revealing the details around too many strangers is worrisome. Shameful. She wipes away tears with the sides of her knuckles, slowly catching the drops and brushing them from her face, shielding the black liner rimming her dark brown eyes. Even misty, her eyes are piercing -- wide and fearless.

She tells her story.

Her father came to the United States from Cuba in the early 1980s. A drug trafficker, he found his way to Kansas City, Kan. where he began a relationship with Mariel’s mother, a young Hispanic drug-addict.

Child Protective Services put Mariel in the foster care system shortly after she was born. She lived with more families than she can remember throughout Kansas City and in Edgerton, Garden City and Wamego. At 8 she was put in the Rainbow Mental Health Facility in Kansas City, Kan. after slitting her wrists. By 12 she was the youngest resident of Oakland House, a group home in Kansas City, Mo. for troubled teenage girls. She has few memories of her childhood, save the endless shuffle of houses, schools and siblings.

“I don’t honestly know what family’s like; I don’t even understand it,” she says. “Today, when I meet people’s families, it’s an awkward feeling because I don’t understand what it’s like to devote time to something like that.”

Mariel’s longest stay in a foster home was with Junior and Julie Russell of Kansas City, Kan., whom she lived with from age nine to 16, though rebelliousness landed her in Oakland House and another group home, Thorpe House, for part of those years.

“When she was a little girl she would come home from school and be worried about someone who didn’t have enough food or someone whose family wasn’t getting along well,” Julie Russell said. “She always had a concern for the underdog, for people who are struggling.”

It was in the Russell’s home that Mariel the academic began to blossom. She and Julie made regular trips to the library, and Mariel was accepted to a math and science summer program at the University of Kansas when she was a sophomore in high school. Julie, a sociology instructor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, would bring an eager Mariel along with her to classes.

“She would come and want to answer questions I posed to the class,” Russell said. “She also loved to argue. She would argue one side and then a couple days later argue for the other side.”

Friend Alisa Reyes said Mariel’s classmates at J.C. Harmon High School knew that higher levels of education lay in Mariel’s future.

“Her nickname was ‘the smart bitch,’” Reyes said. “Everyone always knew she would go to college.”

Mariel never saw herself as smart, nor was there a precise moment when she decided that her future would include college.

“Foster kids don’t grow up with the confidence to think they can go to college,” Mariel says. “I was always loud, and people mistook that for being confident and smart, which wound up getting my foot in the door a lot of places.”

The Russells never legally adopted Mariel and Mariel, never becoming used to a structured home, moved out on her own at 16. One of her high school teachers paid for her ACT, and she graduated a year early and began taking classes at Johnson County Community College. She traveled to Russia with a humanitarian group the summer after graduation.

“It was an experience that really made me push through a lot of the hardships in my life,” she says. “We crawled through a hole in the bottom of a building where 8-year-old twins lived. They had rigged a light bulb, and I remember I hit my head on it and shocked myself because it was an open wire, but it was all they had. How do you go someplace like that and then look at your life and say, ‘poor me’?”

Mariel enrolled at the University of Kansas in fall 2004 as a biology major with her sights set on medical school. But her first semester ended tragically when her father killed himself in December, the morning he was expected to appear in federal court for conspiracy to import marijuana and methamphetamine into the Kansas City area. Mariel had little contact with him throughout her life, but still found herself grief-stricken over his death.

“I cried because of how he had to die, and how I had lost him a long time ago,” she says. “But I knew that going to prison and turning his life around -- that would have been too fairy-tale.”

Now, over two years later, after a battle with her stepmother over money her father left behind, Mariel has decided to change her focus and attend law school. She will complete her undergraduate degree in English in December 2008.

“Words are what I’m good at,” she says. “And with law, I’ve grown up in the system so it’s what I know.”

Mariel’s goal is to work for reform in the foster care system, focusing on developing government programs that support foster children who want to attend college.

“It’s a subculture of lost children,” she says. “Not every foster kid is able to do what I did. These kids are condemned just because they haven’t had the best lives. I want to use my struggles and my experiences to make a difference.”

College has allowed Mariel to explore areas of interest that would have otherwise been left untapped, such as political science and international studies. Latin American Studies instructor Laura Herlihy had Mariel in two classes, Latin American Culture & Society and Gender, Race & Sexuality in Latin America. She was impressed by Mariel’s work ethic and the way Mariel challenged her and the other students to think outside the box.

“Mariel has a raw personality,” Herlihy said. “I liked the way she would speak up and confront the whiners in the classroom -- students that whined about homework or their grades. If Mariel didn’t study, she took full responsibility for it. She moved forward, unfazed.”

For her final project in the course, Mariel produced a video about her father’s life and the lives of other Latinos in Kansas City. Herlihy said the autobiographical portrait gave faces and a voice to the struggles faced by Latin American immigrants.

“Everyone else in the class did standard semester papers,” Herlihy said. “Her video was completely refreshing.”

Last semester, Mariel had to put her education on hold and move back to Kansas City, Kan. to work. Financially independent since 16, she has done everything from answer customer service calls for Embarq Telephone Corporation to deliver Jimmy John’s sub sandwiches at all hours of the night. Now, back in school and getting by on money inherited from her father, Mariel plans to become a stripper to pay for future school expenses.

“I won’t go back to living the way I lived the last couple of years,” she says. “I didn’t have a car. I didn’t have money for school.”

To some the decision may seem unethical -- a desperate last resort. But for a young woman who has lived her life with only herself to depend upon, the choice is not a compromise of morality, but simply a step taken to achieve a goal.

“I don’t see an issue in it,” Mariel says. “I’m not going there to party. I’m going there to take my clothes off and then leave. I used to see it as womanizing, but now I just see it as using the system.”

She isn’t worried that the job will affect her career goals or the way she is treated by her professors and peers.

“I carry myself a certain way in a classroom,” Mariel says. “I’m going to put on my sweats, go to class and actually have money in my pocket. A person can be many different roles in life. That’s where people get stuck in ruts -- they don’t realize that.”

The choice she is making doesn’t seem to weigh on her as she starts her truck to head home to her apartment in Kansas City, Kan. She’s instead focused on spending the afternoon with friends and with Elliott, her golden retriever. Mariel dries her eyes one last time, the liner smudged only slightly around the edges. Her eyes still smolder.

She knows, in the end, she is all she has.

“I’ve had to find my own way out, inside of myself,” she says.

Worrying about the past is normal for Joyce Yuen.

When communicating in English, the Hong Kong freshman has to pay close attention to properly conjugating verbs in the past tense.

“In Chinese, we indicate tense by telling what day we are doing that thing,” Yuen said. “I’m glad people here still know what I’m talking about sometimes, because I forget past participles and endings.”

Yuen’s native language, Mandarin Chinese, is the world’s most widely spoken language with more than one billion speakers. Mandarin Chinese does not mark tense as English does by changing the verb, but rather by adding words known as aspectual markers to the end of the verb.

Yuen began learning English at age six and has lived in the United States for the past two years. She described her command of tense as strong enough to convey most ideas when writing and speaking in English. For Yuen’s parents, who still live in Hong Kong and were not exposed to the language as children, English tense structure remains puzzling.

“I would say it’s much harder for them,” Yuen said. “There are so many tenses to learn and even though they could help me study English, they could never develop the knowledge in the same way.”

University of Kansas linguistics professor Alison Gabriele is researching adult second-language acquisition, and earlier this year completed a study on whether native speakers of Mandarin Chinese can fully acquire English tense as adult learners. Gabriele is working on analyzing and presenting this research in one of two new linguistics labs that opened this month on the fourth floor of the Dole Human Development Center.

“There is really a growing interest in what, if any, limitations there are on adult second-language acquisition,” Gabriele said. “Some researchers have made the very strong claim that if a particular property is not present in the native language, then it is not acquirable in the second language.”

To test this theory, Gabriele used computers to visually present two different stories to 32 adult native Mandarin Chinese speakers who were learning English. Thirteen of the learners were at an intermediate level of English proficiency while 19 were at an advanced level.

One story showed an artist finishing a portrait, and the other showed the artist working on a portrait. After viewing the stories, learners were presented with a sentence in English and asked to determine if the sentence was compatible with one of the stories.

“We make a context really clear and then see whether the participants think the sentence is true given that context,” Gabriele said.

One sentence was in the simple past tense: “Ken painted the portrait.” The second was in the present progressive tense: “Ken is painting the portrait.” The simple past corresponds to completed events but not to ongoing events, while the present progressive tense is compatible with ongoing events, yet not with completed events.

Gabriele said that most learners can correctly match the sentence in the simple past tense to the completed event without having to decipher tense, but they are not able to match the sentence in the present progressive tense to the ongoing event unless they have a solid grasp of English tense construction.

“This is an area of the grammar that seems to remain difficult, even for very advanced learners,” Gabriele said.

The results of the study showed that intermediate learners incorrectly allowed “Ken is painting the portrait” to refer to both stories, but advanced learners were able to restrict the present progressive tense to just the story of the ongoing event.

Gabriele said these results contradict previous research suggesting that traits not present in a learner’s native language cannot be acquired past what linguists call the “critical period” -- the time from infancy to puberty during which the mind can absorb languages quickly and easily.

“Advanced Chinese learners of English were actually able to interpret tense just as well as English native speakers,” Gabriele said. Though a person’s native language does influence their acquisition of a second language, she said the claim that certain traits are not acquirable is too strong. Gabriele said other factors like age, aptitude, motivation and environment may have as much or greater influence on a person’s ability to master elements of grammar unique to a second language.

“There is an enormous amount of individual variation, which makes the area very complicated,” she said.

Gabriele hoped the results of her study would be encouraging for adults trying to become fluent in any foreign language. She also thought the findings would be beneficial to foreign language instructors.

“We can see what types of cross-linguistic differences really matter for second-language learners,” Gabriele said. “If we see that a particular cross-linguistic difference is really challenging, then it could be emphasized in the appropriate way in a classroom.”

In the new lab, Gabriele is working on a presentation of her completed study for upcoming conferences. Though it has been open for only about three weeks, the lab is already in use for other research projects across the linguistics department. The lab’s large main room and two isolated rooms inside the lab provide better testing conditions for experiments.

“Before we moved to the new lab, we had to arrange a classroom to see multiple participants,” said Junko Maekawa, a graduate student from Japan who is one of Gabriele’s research assistants. “Fitting people in the small space wasn’t an ideal environment because people may get claustrophobic or distracted easily.”

The other new linguistics lab has electroencephalography (EEG) equipment, which measures electrical activity in the brain.

Linguistics professor Robert Fiorentino will use the equipment in researching neurolinguistics, a field that looks at the brain functions underlying language processes. Fiorentino said the lab’s new equipment will allow linguistics researchers to collect thorough data on brain activity, which will shed light on the neurological intricacies of language comprehension.

“When neurons work, they yield tiny electrical signals which can be detected on the scalp by electrodes,” Fiorentino said. “Using this method to directly measure brain activity during language tasks provides new evidence for precisely how the language system works.”

Gabriele said studying brain activity is important in decoding the process of second-language acquisition.

“Researchers are interested in how multiple languages are represented in the brain and whether second-language learners process the second language in the same way as native speakers,” she said.

The two labs will begin a collaborative research project in the fall that will look at KU students’ acquisition of Spanish as a second language. Gabriele said she will continue to focus much of her future research on speakers of East Asian languages like Mandarin Chinese, and also on those trying to learn the languages.

“These languages differ in very interesting ways from English,” Gabriele said. “We know very little about how learners actually interpret sentences and I think it is an area worth exploring.”

Seventy-eight students are enrolled in Chinese language courses at the University this semester. Margaret Tran, Derby freshman, decided to start learning Chinese to complement her planned career in the field of international environmental policy. Tran said that Chinese’s lack of complicated tense construction makes learning the language a little less daunting.

“It’s refreshing to not have all the tenses,” Tran said. “But then that’s really the only thing that’s easier about Chinese.”

The third drawer of Jennifer Simpson’s desk is the graveyard for some of her old companions.

“I hang on to them partly out of sentimental reasons,” Simpson said. “They were so important that I feel like I should keep them for now, just in case.”

Simpson, Topeka sophomore, isn’t preserving valuable documents or storing souvenirs for safe-keeping, but is instead holding on to something that has been close by her side since her 16th birthday: her cell phones.

More than 500 million cell phones lay unused in the United States according to an April 2007 report by the Environmental Protection Agency. The report estimated that 150 million more phones will be discarded this year. The number promises to grow each future year, and the small devices can have big effects on the environment if, when evicted from the drawer, they are thrown away rather than recycled.

“A cell phone is so small that you don’t even think twice about throwing it away,” said Gerald Hartman, lead technician at Kansas E-Recycle, a private electronics recycling service. “A computer is so bulky, most people know they should recycle it.”

The number of cell phone users in the United States more than tripled from 1996 to 2006 according to a survey by the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association. The rapid availability of cell phone upgrades has caused the increase in cell phone waste, as consumers purchase more of newer models of phones and more of their older phones enter the waste system.

Discarded cell phones are a sliver of the growing problem of electronic waste, or e-waste: unwanted electronics that pose health and environmental risks if not recycled. Cell phones, along with computers, televisions and household appliances, contain lead and mercury, two elements that cause damage to the brain and the peripheral nervous system if they are put into landfills and are able to enter the water supply.

Local recycling services have not been able to keep up with the steady increase of e-waste that has come from living in a world of ever-advancing technology.

“It’s not a very simple thing to do,” said Kathy Richardson, supervisor of Lawrence Waste Reduction and Recycling, which operates the city’s public recycling services. “Not only does it require a big facility, it requires paid staff. You don’t make money off of it.”

Though the state does not consider electronics hazardous waste -- only seven states do -- the Kansas Department of Health and Environment is taking a step to curb e-waste by introducing a grant to fund the construction of e-waste collection facilities in five Kansas counties. The grants will also fund two years of operating expenses for the warehouses, and KDHE will pay each county three cents per pound of electronic waste that it moves from the warehouse to a recycler.

“At the national level, the solutions to try to deal with this have not appeared,” said Kent Foerster, chief of waste reduction, grants and public outreach at KDHE. “We wanted to see what we could do to spark more collection, and then take the data from this experience and push for legislation.”

Foerster said the department planned to have the new facilities spread out across the state in both urban and rural communities. The grants will be awarded in September and the collection facilities should be operating by January 2008.

Though Douglas County has the highest recycling rate in the state of Kansas according to Lawrence Waste Reduction and Recycling -- with 34 percent of its total waste being recycled -- the county may not be among those applying for the new grant.

“For the city of Lawrence to take on a project like this, it would be very important for us to track where our waste ends up,” Richardson said. She was concerned that the state-funded collection facilities would pass the e-waste to recyclers who would extract the valuable materials like gold and copper and put the rest in a landfill, still allowing the toxic elements into the environment. Another of Richardson’s concerns was that the e-waste would be exported to parts of the world where recyclers could find cheaper labor but where the material would still be left to pollute the environment.

“To pay a person here to process equipment costs a lot of money,” Richardson said. “Instead it’s going to really poor countries, to towns where there’s not even a landfill. But if we’re polluting China, we’re polluting ourselves.”

Foerster said the state could not guarantee that e-waste gathered in the collection facilities wouldn’t end up overseas because the federal government had not placed restrictions on this method of disposal. He said the state did plan to regulate the local recyclers that the new facilities use to ensure that the recyclers do not remove the valuable components of an electronic and send the rest to a landfill.

“We can require that they take it to a vendor that we approve. If we’re paying for it, that’s the way it will be done,” Foerster said.

Though she said Douglas County has not ruled out applying for the grant, Richardson emphasized existing alternatives for e-waste disposal.

“I think Lawrence has a lot of options,” Richardson said. “People get stuck thinking there should be mandatory city-sponsored recycling.”

Kansas E-Recycle, which recycles the University’s old electronics, picks up most old electronics taken to UNI Computers, 1403 W. 23rd Street. Gerald Hartman, the only collector for Kansas E-Recycle, said about five percent of electronics that he picks up are up-to-date and in good condition, and he passes them along to charitable organizations. About 20 percent are obsolete models that he sends to other countries where those models are still in use, and about 75 percent of what Hartman collects is disassembled for individual parts to be reused or disposed of through environmentally-safe processes.

“The main goal is to keep it out of a landfill,” Hartman said. “Most recyclers are honest, but I know of a few ones around here that aren’t.”

Located in Eskridge, Kansas E-Recycle mostly collects e-waste for northeast Kansas, though Hartman said he had made trips to Wichita, Goodland and even Lincoln, Neb. to pick up unwanted electronics from collection sites that want to make sure their waste is properly disposed of.

Hartman started Kansas E-Recycle in October 1999 after working as a computer technician and noticing the growing amount of e-waste but no emerging solution for the problem. Though he said he was pleased with the state’s decision to fund e-waste collection facilities and hoped to contract with some of them, Hartman said more action was needed on the federal level if e-waste was to be sufficiently dealt with.

“If they don’t step in and help the recyclers with our expenses, there’s going to be millions of televisions in landfills in the next few years,” Hartman said, referring to U.S. television broadcasts becoming exclusively digital in February 2009, which will make every analog television set obsolete -- an estimated 12 percent of televisions in use in the United States.

Hartman said the ideal procedure for controlling e-waste would be customers paying a recycling fee as part of purchasing any new electronic.

On campus, KU Recycling collects large electronics placed with other outgoing recyclable materials at each building’s designated pick-up point. For small electronics like cell phones, students living in residence halls or scholarship halls can pick up mail-in packets from each building’s academic resource center to send in their electronics to be recycled by the manufacturer. Jeff Severin, manager of the University’s Environmental Stewardship Program, said KU Recycling began stocking student housing with the packets in fall 2005 as cell phones were becoming a staple among college students.

Another option for students wanting to get old cell phones off their hands in an environmentally-friendly way is through the online business RIPMobile, which pays for old cell phones in the form gift certificates to businesses like Circuit City and Starbucks.

“We make recycling feel like consuming, which everyone likes to do,” said RIPMobile President and CEO Seth Heine, who started the business in 2005.

Anyone recycling a cell phone through RIPMobile visits the business’s Web site, ripmobile.com, where they calculate the phone’s value and choose the business through which they want to be reimbursed in gift certificates. Customers also have the option of donating the return on their old cell phones to charities. RIPMobile cleans phones of all content and sends them to buyers around the world, which is what allows them to pass part of the phone’s worth on to its original owner. Even if a phone has no value, RIPMobile still recycles it to keep its harmful components from ending up in a landfill.

Heine said he started RIPMobile to draw attention to a type of waste that even those who consistently recycle tend to overlook.

“I just realized that everyone had a phone sitting in a drawer that could easily be put to use somewhere else,” Heine said.

College students make up a large part of Heine’s market, as he said most students upgrade their cell phones annually.

After learning about the incentives offered through RIPMobile, Simpson said she was more likely to recycle her three old cell phones should she ever decide she wants her drawer space back.

“Even though recycling should already feel rewarding, it never hurts to use money to motivate people,” Simpson said.