Waste Minimisation: Waste Audit

Our school is committed to reducing our waste. 

Every year we do two WASTE AUDITS to check how we are going with putting rubbish in the right bin and thinking of ways to reduce what we are putting in the red landfill bins. 

We collected the landfill rubbish from ALL areas of the school over 6 days. 

We had teams that sorted some at a time:  

- Kea classes (year 0 / 1/ 2) 

- Tui classes  (year 3 / 4 5/ 6) 

- Hall bins

- Staff bins

These items should have been kept for soft plastic recycling

These things should have been put into the green compost bins 

These things should have been put into the yellow recycle bins 

These things were put in the right bin - they have to go to landfill 

We found out that:

> We collected 17.0 kg of waste from the landfill bins.

> This was more than last waste audit (back in March) but we now have another class and we had some playdough which weighed A LOT! We also counted paper towels from the staff areas this time and we didn't include that last time. 

> 45% of the rubbish should have been recycled or composted.  This is about the same as last time. 

> Collecting old, broken pens for our 'special recycling' project was a good idea as the box is now full! 

Three areas we need to keep working on are:

1) Soft plastic - reducing the amount of plastic lunchbox wrappers we see at school.  These are always a problem - blowing around outside and ending up in the food scrap bins! 

2) Paper Towels - in some school areas we seem to use a lot - we can't compost that many! Can we reduce how many we are using? 

3) Paper - some paper is ended up in landfill and we are also using a lot of paper. How can we reduce this?