Bin Audit

Over one working week (5 working days), Thurso High janitors team and campaign leader Oksana were checking all litter bins located throughout Thurso High to collect any recyclable waste that was disposed of in a wrong bin, as well as all contaminated recyclable waste from recycling bins.

The objective of this bin audit is show how much of potentially recyclable waste never gets to the phase of recycling and is left to degrade in landfill.

Below you can see how the pile of our failed recycling was growing during our audit.

Day 1

After all the failed recycling was collected, we sorted our waste into categories, separated good recyclable items from general waste that was contaminating it and weighed all failed recycling.

We also took count of all food containers from hospitality classes that were discarded, full of food. Sadly, quite a few of them were thrown into the recycling compartments of waste bins and thus badly contaminated otherwise perfect recycling.

We are very grateful to Rachel Prideaux, 6S2, for her kind help with the audit. She volunteered to assist with this not particularly pleasant exercise in her free time, and we would like to say thank you and award Rachel with first 20 points issued at this campaign! Thank you and well done Rachel!

Overall, the bin audit demonstrated that, during one week of normal life at Thurso High, an average of 18kg of recyclable waste fails to be recycled and is sent to landfill, due to discarding it to a wrong bin, or contaminating the recycling bin and all its content with unrecyclable type of waste.

The main category of failed recycling appeared to be plastic single use bottles. We collected 320 of those, 253 were empty and potentially recyclable, while 67 were still containing liquid and could not be recycled unless emptied (which we did).

Main contaminants were soft plastic wraps and food waste discarded in recycling compartments of litter bins. Sadly, we found 11 food containers full of food cooked at the hospitality classes, thrown in recycling bins, and thus really badly contaminating otherwise perfect recycling.

Good points:

• We can see that most of bin users are very good with their recycling habits and do not make a lot of mistakes in categorizing their waste. Around 80% of the content of recycling bins was correct, good recycling. So, if we do just a little better and improve only that every 5th item thrown into recycling bin, that is wrong!

• Our litter picker skills after this week - level God!

• There is definitely a wish to recycle soft plastic within Thurso High inhabitants, we just need to get better educated on how to do it right!

  The detailed report on bin audit will be available for download in due course.