Richard Herries arrived Saturday morning at Wal-Mart with a vehicle stuffed full of plastics, newspapers and bottles ready for the recycling bin.

“We do this to eliminate as much landfill as we can and save the environment,” said Herries, a golf course superintendent. “I don’t care if it’s one can or 100 cans. If you pick it up and put it away, it helps.”

A city advisory board is doing a study its members hope will create more recyclers in Lawrence like Herries.

The Recycling and Resource Conservation Advisory Board is close to completing an “ecological footprint” study to measure the effect Lawrence residents have on the environment.

Members hope the results could include initiatives to create an “Office of Sustainability” at City Hall, increased recycling efforts and city incentives to build eco-friendly homes.

“Basically, we’re trying to quantify the amount of the Earth’s resources that Lawrence is using, and go from there to develop policies that will try to reduce that usage,” said Bruce Plenk, a Lawrence environmental attorney leading the study.

Ecological footprint studies have been done in cities across the country and around the world. A 1993 world study, for example, showed the United States consumed 10.3 hectares of resources per person — by far the largest rate in the world. A hectare is about 2.47 acres.

The problem, according to the report, is the United States only has 6.7 hectares of resources per person. The report says that means the country is living beyond sustainable means.

Recycling board members and their allies want to see how Lawrence compares. They’ll do that by measuring such categories as utility usage, car usage, recycling, overall consumption of food and other factors.

“It’s important to gauge it and figure out, year to year, how we’re doing in consumption per person,” said Shannon Criss, a Kansas University associate professor of architecture. “I think we could actually understand if we’re increasing our footprint, staying stable, or reducing.”

¢ Recycling and Resource Conservation Advisory Board¢ Recycling program popular (9-22-02)¢ Recycling efforts growing by heaps and bounds (4-03-01)

Criss led a class last fall that helped the board get started with the study.

Steve Hughes, recycling board member, said early results had shown the task was daunting.

“The things I thought would have an impact end up being so small in the entire picture,” he said. “If we have one house that goes photoelectric, it’s just one out of a big number that it’s discouraging.”

But Hughes and others said they thought Lawrence as a whole, while perhaps not environmentally perfect, was consuming less than many other cities.

“I think the numbers are encouraging through the voluntary efforts at Wal-Mart, the cardboard places around town and the hazardous waste recycling on 23rd Street,” Mayor Sue Hack said. “The numbers go up every year, but we need to continue to improve.”

The results of the study are expected by Earth Day, April 19. Plenk hopes the findings help change Lawrence.

“If every house built in Lawrence had solar hot water or solar panels for electricity,” he said, “we’d have a better world.”