Waste Audit

This activity is called waste audit and it is when we gather trash from the classrooms and weigh it and sort through what COULD have been recycled and/or reused in the classrooms.

Here is a picture of garbage from the school trash bin and as you start to notice, lots of paper is in the plastic bag when it can be clearly recycled. Those papers can also be reused as scratch paper and when they are done with it they could have recycled it to be made into brand new paper, for the school.
As you see here, weighing the bag is one of the easiest process' of the waste audit activity, well in most opinions its better then looking through garbage trying to find and fix another persons "mistake." on average the trash weighed about 5-8 lbs. filled with possibly anything you could think of, including things that should have been in the recycling bin.

We dumped the trash onto the tarp and these are some of the items that were found, various papers and were thrown out and it's partly a good thing that we saw some food wrappers from lunch then seeing it on the littered ground or hallways. (but in other words the food scrapings could have been composted and the wrappers could have been in the recycling trash can.

Sorting the trash was gruesome, but they were able to separate them into different piles, one for bottles, paper and food. It took some amount of extra time and volunteers but we got it done. Although, if people were a bit more considerate this job wouldn't have had to be so hard or had to be done at all.





After all the piling and sorting , we once again weighed each bag of different material and as our research shows have that the majority of the trash was filled with paper, and the other percentage was the food scrapings and the other percentage was the plastic bottles and other garbage (etc.)

Most of these materials could have been thrown out with the consideration of being recycled, reused and therfore reduced the amount of garbage at school, concluding to saving money for possibly other opportunities for students and teachers and all the same being able to practice the 4r's and leaving our school looking great. Another way that the trash and litter can be put to a minimum is that we could provide more trash bins around campus, including plenty of recycling bins as well. Maybe with even more apparent signs on them motivating them to throw certain materials in the various garbage bins.

Here is the process of the waste auditing in action!