Less to Landfill - learning where our waste should go!

LATEST UPDATE... Colour Run and Family Fun Night 

All year we have been focusing on putting things in the right bin and trying to have less in the red landfill bin. 

To finish off the year we had a Family Fun Night and Colour Run event.

At this event we had an enviro stall. 

We were selling the following 'zero waste' items: 

* lunchboxes, 

* honey wraps, 

* baking jar mixes and 

* fresh veggies from the school garden, 

We also had a game where you had to sort 12 rubbish items into the correct coloured bin: 

RED - landfill - mainly broken things or things made from mixed materials like coffee cups,

YELLOW - recyclables - paper, card, drinks can and a plastic bottle,

GREEN - compostables - food scraps and napkins, 

BLUE - other items that shouldn't go in the landfill - like e waste (batteries) and soft plastic. 

If you scored 10 or higher in the game you won prizes! These were books, cookies and 2nd hand toys.

We collected ALL the rubbish from this event and had:

Total waste collected = 23.04kg (from ALL the 4 bins) 

Waste diverted from landfill = 16.68kg (everything from the yellow / green and soft plastic bin) 

Four students helped check, photograph and weigh the rubbish from this event.

The rubbish was in four different bins: landfill, recycling, soft plastic and compostable. 

 What we noticed was...

'There's a lot of coffee cups in the landfill bag' 

'Wow! We are doing a lot of recycling'

' My bag is very light (green)'

' This (soft plastic bag) looks like the lolly shop!'

To date we have now collected 168.97kg of waste since we began our records (September 2020) 

We have saved 137.79kg from being buried in the landfill. 

We thought about how we could ask food truck companies what packaging they use and ask them to investigate more environmentally friendly packaging - like more in cardboard which we can compost. We also wondered if, as we only invite out school community if it would be possible for families to bring their OWN containers and receive a discount.  

There was a LOT of recycling! 

Mainly tissues and napkins 

LOTS of coffee cups and plastic lined food containers