Over the three days, 23 bags of garbage and 10 bags of recycling were gathered. The students did an audit of one of the three days, dividing the garbage into categories of actual garbage, compost materials, and recyclable materials. Here is what they found.
One days garbage weighs in at 121 pounds.Of the 123 pounds of garbage:
- 21 pounds was paper
- 6 pounds was plastic
- 7 pounds was cans
- 10 pounds was compost
This computes to 36% of the garbage being either material that could have been recycled or composted. How does this translate per student. Currently, based on the one day waste audit, the average student puts over 82 pounds of items into the garbage. This could be reduced to 52 pounds per student per year if they recycled. This would result in 8500 pounds less items in the landfill if everyone was efficient at recycling.
Issues brought up by the girls included people putting garbage into recycle bins. If not sorted, then the recycle materials mixed with garbage is all considered garbage. The school does not have the resources to sort all recycling, and the Town does not sort recycling either. The school will also redistrbute recycle bins for this Monday.
The girls ended their assembly to the students with a challenge to improve the recycling efficiency of our school. Students were then asked to complete a short survey about recycling. A similar audit will be conducted in a year to see if the student population has succeeded.
