The Waste Sort

A Waste Sort is designed to give a realistic picture of your school’s current waste performance. It should tell you what you are doing well and what you need to improve. The waste sort will help you produce your action plan, which is the next stage of the certificate.

An education officer will be on hand to run this activity. The school waste sort will involve the following:

Collecting the waste that is thrown away in school. This waste will be weighed at this point with spring balanced scales. This weight will be recorded.

The collected waste will be emptied out onto the plastic sheeting, usually in the school hall.

Selected children (no more than 10) will sort the waste into categories of materials; compostable, recyclable, re-usable and materials sent to landfill.

Identify what quantities of the waste going to landfill could easily be diverted by composting and recycling etc.
The landfilled waste remaining will be analysed to see what the waste contains. This will be logged and dealt with in the action plan.
The remaining landfill waste will be weighed to see how much this has reduced.
The weight of the compostable and recyclable waste will also be weighed so that this information can be put into a chart or graph. The proportions of waste will also be recorded as these two pieces of information can often differ.

You can now move onto the Action Plan stage.