Our Easter Waste Audit

Recount of Sunnyhills Easter Waste Audit with Mrs Daniel

Yesterday, Mrs Daniel told us “Tomorrow, we will be sorting out our rubbish to see how much rubbish we make everyday” as soon as she told my class, room 1. I was so excited! Mrs Daniel gave us each a room number, others 2. I got room 5! I stepped into the classroom. “Excuse me, could I please borrow your rubbish bin for Mrs Daniel’s waste audit?” I asked.

“Sure!” replied the teacher, “Anything to help the environment!” I carried the rubbish bin into the new green room. Luckily, room 5 was just next to the green room so I didn’t need to carry the rubbish bin far. 

We collected all the bins from classrooms, offices, the staffroom and resource rooms. We don’t have any playground bins cause we take our lunch box litter home or have a litter free lunch.

Now, today we were sorting out rubbish! I enjoyed helping nature! We walked in a line to the Green room, we saw tons of rubbish everywhere: Mountains of paper, smelly rubbish, plastic containers and more… We first sorted out the biodegradable waste from the landfill bins. We weighed the waste, then took away 1.66kg because the green bin weighed that much. Green waste in landfill is bad because it makes methane gas.

The main thing is to find how much waste we made in total in a day. How much goes to landfill. How much is being composted or recycled already. We also want to check if things are in the right place and think how we could reduce our landfill waste.  

Then we sorted out the paper recycling bins, this time I helped, along with my classmates. We found some laminated paper in the recycling that should have been in the landfill bins. We were in a rush because our disco was very soon. We weighed the paper too. Using 5 bins. We found out that there was a smaller bin! We added all the paper weight and got 7.42kg. That’s a lot of paper but at least it’s being recycled.

We sorted the recycling bin waste and weighed it. Hard plastic .6 kg and cardboard .8 kg. Then we had to walk the paper and recycling all the way to the bins on the road side to be picked up today.

After the disco and morning tea, we went back to the green room. Some of the class played an online recycling game, some sorted, some weighed and some recorded what we were doing.  

We weighed the worm farm bin waste. Sorted the rest of the landfill waste into piles of paper towels, food waste, soft plastic, paper, hard plastic and other. And kept weighing and recording on the whiteboard.

The total amount of waste was thirteen point seven six kilograms. Nine point zero six kilograms of this is already being composted all recycled.

Altogether there was four point seven kilograms of landfill waste and we thought that maybe one point eight two kilograms could be diverted if we recycle soft plastic, compost all food waste and try to compost paper towels.

We’re going to do another waste audit later in the year to see if our ideas make less landfill waste.

By Grace, Indi & Ella in Room 1