Recycling at School

Recycling at our school has been an issue for a while, with a large percentage of waste going to the incinerator every year. As a Roots and Shoots club, we decided to take action against this! We met with the Head of Facilities to discuss what we can do.

We learned that a company called Sustainable Waste Management manages the waste from the school. They supply recycling and garbage bins and pick up all the waste to recycle or dispose of. The school gets reports every month to show how much waste was produced and what has been done to it. The main reason for the low recycling percentage is contamination of recycling with food waste. We agreed that the best way to combat this is to raise awareness about what goes in each bin. We will be meeting a representative from the company soon to discuss how to do this, but some ideas are to:

Have club members stand next to the bins and tell people which bin to choose
Have clearer marking on the bins (this has already been taken care of by Facilities; there are now signs with the name of the waste on the bin)
Make announcements to remind students that they need to pay attention to recycling
Find ways to reduce the trash produced

Our recycling target by the end of the year is 45-50% of total waste (a 10-15% increase). Stay tuned to hear if we have met our goal!

Click here for the Sustainable Waste Management website.

The green bins are for food waste, the black ones are for

general waste. Recycling bins are not pictured.