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? 

Adopt a Park #4

 This week we had our final trip to our adopted park - William Green Domain. 

The weather was not looking the best but we were determined to get a final visit in for the year. 

Focus: HOW DO WE KNOW WE'RE MAKING A DIFFERENCE? 

We want to start measuring the positive impact we are making on this space.  

We can do this by counting the amount of trees we have planted and the amount of rubbish we collect. 

We looked at the native trees we planted earlier in the year and saw they were quite smothered by weeds. We tried to squash down the weeds then put some dried grass as mulch round the base in a doughnut shape.  We counted about 7 cabbage trees and 8 flax in the first section (up to the big tree). 

After we had done that we did a quick "10 minute rubbish challenge" to see how much rubbish we could pick up.

Back at school (after we had dried off and had Milo to warm up!) we sorted, weighed and counted all the rubbish.  

We collected: 177 pieces of rubbish weighing 4.23kg. 

we sorted the rubbish out into piles to see what we had found... 

Lots of plastic bottles / hard plastic ...

122 pieces of soft plastic

bottle lids

and lots of other takeaway cups

Going forward we will think about how we can reduce the amount of these items in our environment. 

Rubbish Relays!

We have been thinking about all the rubbish that has to go in the red bins. 

We played a game where we made a 'rubbish rainbow'.

We were in teams and one person had to run and grab an (old, broken) pen and put it into our red hoop.

Then the next person in our team went and grabbed a different colour pen - we arranged them to make a colourful rainbow.  There were a lot of pens! We talked about how we could reduce the amount of pens that are going in the red landfill bin. 

Afterwards we did the same relay activity but used soft plastic instead. We realised there was still quite a bit of wrappers around our school. 

The following week, we had a visitor called Penelope from Beautification Trust.   She talked to us about what should go into each bin and WHY.  

We did a really fun relay activity where we had to grab some rubbish from a bag and then run to the front and put it into the correct coloured bin; 

red for landfill

yellow for recycling

green for composting

What did we learn? 

* That tetra pak is made from plastic, metal and cardboard (and has to go into landfill or special recycling) (Mikayla)

* The paper straws are just as bad as plastic straws and can't be recycled as they are lined with plastic.  (Mahi) 

That wooden cutlery can be recycled  (Angie) 

Waste Audit Term 4 2024

Recently we conducted a waste audit. 

We collected all the red landfill bins from around the school and poured them into piles. 

Then we sorted the rubbish to see what should have been in the recycle bin (yellow), 

compost bin (green) or in soft plastic recycling. 

  

Things in landfill break down very slowly and produce poisonous methane gas. 

The landfills in Auckland and getting bigger and bigger every day. 

We need to try and recycle things or make them into compost instead of just burying them in the ground. 

These things should have been in the recycle bins: 

 

 

 These things should have been in the green compost bins: 

. 

 

Here are some of the things that should have been in soft plastic recycling. 

. 

.

This is some examples of things that were correctly placed into the red landfill bins: 

 

How many pens can you count? 

                              

We also checked the huge landfill bin in the car park to see what else might have been put directly in there. 

We found... 

These are just 2 of the 4 or 5 bags that were mostly full of paper towels.
We were wondering where they all came from! 

The Results! 

This data is for ALL school areas for 5 days worth of rubbish. 

* Amount that should've been composted: 1.32kg 

* Amount that should've been recycled: 1.51kg

* Amount that should've been put into soft plastic recycling:  0.41kg

* Amount that was correctly placed in the landfill bins: 3.56kg

TOTAL waste: 6.8kg for 5 days. 

Amount that was in the wrong bin: 3.24kg (48%) 

(that is NOT including all the paper towels we found afterwards) 

Positives: 

💚 This works out an average of 1.36kg a day that we are putting into the landfill bins 

- our best ever result! 

💚 We are now seeing less lunchbox wrappers in the bins compared to last time. 

💚 Some classes are now EXPERTS at recycling - Room 5/6/7/8 had only ONE recyclable 

item incorrectly placed in the landfill bin! Ka Pai! 

What Next? 

 P1. Paper Towels

Reminders to all staff & classes to put paper towels in the compost bins. 

We will also research ways to reduce the amount of paper towels we are putting into 

the landfill bin each week.

P2. Soft Plastic 

This appears to be mainly packaging from teacher resources. 

We need to come up with a plan for how we can collect this soft plastic & recycle it. 

P3. Pens 

We want to have less stationery (pens) going to landfill. 

We will research what other schools have done.

We'll make some containers for all classroom to put old broken pens (& batteries) into. 

P4. Recycling- Paper

Reminders to all staff & classes to put paper in the recycle bins. 

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: