Waste Audit Project

By:

Instructor:  Mrs. Jean Young

Class:  Introduction to Green Building Concepts, Semester 2

Waste Audit How-To Video Created by Makayla Keegan-Bush, class of 2012

Waste Audit Essay Written by Adam Akiu, class of 2012

Around the world, people notice that there’s a big problem with our trash. For years, we wanted to degrade our trash to a smaller size. Unfortunately, people never saw the importance of reducing their waste and try to ignore it. In the near future, if we don’t take action, the problem might blow up in our faces and we will regret doing nothing. If that happens, it will be too late. In our world today, we rely on disposable objects too much to take care of our precious needs. If we can accept the new environmental technology that’s being made today, we can actually help ourselves and the earth. It may take a while for society to accept the newest ways of green technology, we’ve been using fake, man-made items so long and haven’t looked at other alternatives.

Not only is “green” about keeping the earth, it can mean economically. Finding
ways to save money, and spending that money the right way to keep the earth
“green” is a good idea. This is what we should try to do, since having power
efficient transportation can be cheaper and can help the environment while
driving. Having the 4 R’s in your life isn’t so bad either: Rethinking of
ideas, Reducing our waste, Reusing objects that can be used again, and
Recycling your glass, plastic, and cans. The 4 R’s can be the first step for
humanity to accept efficient power, it’s very simple for someone to do this kind of thing. If this can be accepted, we can have a new wave of living and a new future.

On April 12, the middle school and Green Building class got together and did a waste audit of the school’s trash. We separated the trash by various categories: Recyclable, Compostable, Reusable, and Refusables. The refusables contained various plastics and foam. With those amounts, we calculated the weight of the waste to show how much people use those refusables. Then, we compared the later results to see what the outcome was on how much refusables were used.

There were some, but noticeable changes in the results. Our first results came out very differently, here’s a table from the results:

Here’s the types of the refusable waste:

And the percentage of refusables:

These showings tell that we use too much refusables and have a lot of compost. Of course, compost is good for the plants. But, refusables are unacceptable. We’ll need to try figure out to use less or no refusable waste. We even tried to figure out substitutions for the plates and forks we use. The bags can weigh as much as a small animal, that would show that our waste is pretty heavy.

I think the results show what we’re doing wrong, and what we should do instead. Sustainability specialist Hunter Heaivilin helped us very much on this project, we’ve learned how to conserve and use greener ways of living. The 4 R’s taught us to use our waste intelligently, and what we can use to keep the Earth vigorous. For most public people, they might know us as the iGeneration. The Internet Generation made a change to all children who were born from the 90s and on. Since the internet has been on for so long, why not look up ways to help our Earth? We are more advanced in knowledge than people were back then, we have infinite knowledge in our fingertips.