Today, Year Five helped Ms Daniel conduct our waste audit to see if we are being successful in diverting waste away from landfill.
First we played a game to see if we knew the right place to put our waste. We had to choose between:
- paper recycling
- soft plastic
- comingled recycling
- general waste (red lid bin)
- food scraps / hot compost
- garden compost / worm farm
- hazardous waste
- op shop
There's so many places we can send our waste to be reused, composted or recycled so our world doesn't fill up with rubbish.
Afterwards we did a reading comprehension to analyse the results of the last waste audit.
Lastly we sorted all the waste from one day and weighed it:
Hot Compost 3.25kg (2.22kg in 2024)
Soft Plastic .35kg (soft plastic not collected in 2024)
Paper Recycling 1.25 kg (5.9kg in 2024)
Comingled Recycling 0.2 kg (0.1kg in 2024)
General Waste 1.25 kg (3kg in 2024)
Concerns -
compostables in waste 0.2 (Puka tea bags are recycleable) (0.72kg in 2024)
contamination in paper recycling 0.01 Room 1
contamination in recycling 0.05 (Up and Go boxes can't be recycled)
Can ice block sticks be composted? Yes :)
Recycling in waste 0.05 (1.08kg in 2024)
Analysis:
Last time we had 3kg of landfill waste and this time we had 1.25kg. What a dramatic drop! One reason may be that we made it a school rule that the Wednesday pizza boxes had to go home.
Total diverted from landfill went from 8.22kg to 5.05kg. This is because there was much less paper in the paper recycling bins (5.9kg vs 1.25kg), so that's good news.
Contamination dropped from 1.81kg to 0.35kg. That's another huge drop! Teachers and students on the whole are putting waste in the right bins.
We still have some work to do. We are not perfect. The Eco Group will analyse more and see what actions we take to improve the contamination rate. We can't wait to share our awesome results with other Enviroschools.
