Waste Audit

What is a waste audit?

We collected all the red (landfill) bins from areas around the school. These contained 4 days worth of landfill rubbish. We looked at what was in the bins that could have been recycled or composted instead of buried in the landfill.  

Sorting the landfill waste from the Tui classrooms

We looked at the landfill waste of our 4 groups:

1) Tui classrooms

2) Kea classrooms

3) Staff areas

4) Hall users

Why do we do it? 

This helps us see how we can reduce our school landfill waste even further.

Landfills are not good because we don't want to keep burying at the rubbish in the ground - it produces harmful methane gas and we'll run out of space! Also, some of the things buried in landfill are useful - they can make compost or be recycled.

After last years waste audit we focused on:

- making sure we recycled plastic bottle and scrap paper

- putting tissues and paper towels in the green compost bins

- trying to re-purpose things rather than throw them in landfill.

How did we do?

We split the waste into:

* What needed to go to landfill (red bins)

* What could have been recycled (in the yellow bin)

* What could have been composted (in the green bins)

* What could have been recycled as soft plastic.

It was great to see a 36% reduction in what we are putting into landfill!

* 2022: 3.17kg a day

* 2023: 2.03kg a day

Kea classrooms are great at recycling! 

Kea classrooms are great at composting!

We collect soft plastic and recycle it at Countdown but these obviously got missed out
from the 'soft plastic sausage' 

The hall users are doing a great job at reducing waste!

We achieved really pleasing results with much less waste in many areas.
We realised we need to keep working on ways to reduce soft plastic at school. 

2022 Results:

2023 Results: