By RUSS OLIVO

WOONSOCKET — With the city's solid waste managers under pressure to improve recycling rates, a student at Johnson & Wales University has left them with some food for thought on the subject.

No, Ndiale Gueye is not enrolled in J&W's esteemed culinary arts program, she's a senior with a major in network engineering — something you probably don't want to try in the kitchen.
A native of the West African nation of Senegal, Gueye, 25,  recently finished a three-month internship in the engineering division at City Hall looking for inefficiencies in the city's trash recycling program. Her prescription for robust recycling: A campaign to heighten awareness of the program and tougher sanctions against those who repeatedly fail to follow the rules.
“I would definitely do more marketing and public education,” says Gueye. “It's not that recycling isn't something people don't want to do. Maybe they don't know how to do it and what they're doing it for.”
Gueye arrived at her recommendations after spending 25 hours a week poring over recycling data and riding around in trucks with robotic arms that scoop up sidewalk barrels filled with paper, plastic and glass.
The eureka moment came when she realized that recycling rates were comparatively low on days corresponding to certain collection routes. Gueye says city officials should not assume that the lower participation in those areas is willful. Something as simple as a language barrier might be impeding residents from participating in the recycling program, she says, but the city will only know for sure if it takes a closer look at the problem.
Officials at the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation, operators of Central Landfill in Johnston, say Woonsocket recycles over 25 percent of its total waste stream on a regular basis. That's a dramatic improvement from the recent past, but the state says recyclables must make up no less than 35 percent of everything
cities and towns dispatch to the space-limited landfill by 2012,  a goal that poses a daunting challenge — not just for Woonsocket, but many communities.
Though Gueye has spent much of the last four years in the U.S. preparing for a very high-tech career, she was nevertheless “amazed” by the level of technological sophistication already at work in the seemingly mundane endeavor of trash collection. Not only are the trucks fully automated, they're equipped with remote cameras and computer technology that automatically sends out alerts to homeowners who aren't recycling properly.
Gueye's native tongue, a language known as Wolof, doesn't even have a word for recycling. Wolof is one of at least a half-dozen languages indigenous to Senegal, a still-developing country only slightly more populous than the state of Illinois.
To communicate with people outside their language group, Senegalese generally rely on French, which is taught in all the schools back home, says Gueye. She is now fluent in English, her third language, which was completely new to her when she enrolled at J&W.
Gueye, whose father runs a chain of bakeries in their hometown of Dakar, the capital of Senegal, does not necessarily aspire to a career in solid waste management. She chose network engineering as her major because one day she hopes to return to Senegal to help the country build its fledgling telecommunications industry.
The field of network engineering involves designing computer systems to drive large industrial and commercial operations that are essential to economic stability and growth, says Gueye. After she earns her undergraduate degree from J&W this spring, Gueye says her next goal is to seek a master's in business administration. The Providence resident says she will study in the U.S., but hasn't chosen a school yet.
Telecommunications is still her ultimate goal, but Gueye says that thanks to her experience at City Hall she is at least open to the idea of applying the principles of network engineering in the field of waste management.
“It's something I would be willing to do,” she says.