It’s hard to imagine anything grosser than digging through a high schooler’s trash. Luckily, Legacy High School’s Environmental Club has you covered. On February 10th, club members rolled up their sleeves and got to work, conducting a waste audit on the school’s trash.
A waste audit is where people come together to sort through an organization’s trash. Through sorting, they hope to find areas of waste management that the organization excels in and can improve on.
Partnering with Eco-Cycle, a Zero Waste organization that promotes recycling and composting, the Environmental Club sorted through various samples of February 10th’s trash. These samples included a recycling toter from the school hallway, two cafeteria trash bins, and the kitchen’s trash. The goal was to learn what Legacy High School recycles and opportunities for future composting.
The Recycling
From Eco-Cycle
Sorting through a recycling toter from the hallway revealed that Legacy does an impressive job when it comes to putting the right trash into recycling bins. In the picture above, the right represents waste correctly placed in the recycling. However, there is still room to grow; the left represents waste that was incorrectly recycled.
Diving deeper into this, the incorrectly recycled waste was mainly made up of greasy cardboard, napkins, small scraps of paper, and crumpled-up paper. At a first glance, these items seem relatively recyclable. However, trash that has an excess of food residue on it, such as greasy cardboard and napkins, cannot be recycled. After all, food residue threatens to contaminate trash and cause mold to grow in recycling bins, leading to entire batches of recycling being sent to landfills. In addition, after talking to Kathy Nguyen and Kim Orr, Eco-Cycle members who helped conduct the waste audit, the Environmental Club learned that scraps of paper smaller than the palm should not be recycled because they threaten to gunk up machines at recycling centers. Furthermore, crumpled paper shouldn’t be recycled because it is often mistaken for metal by sorting machines.
The Cafeteria Trash
During the waste audit, trash from the cafeteria was also sorted through. Out of 39 pounds of waste, 22 pounds were made up of correctly thrown-away trash. However, it’s important to note that 16 of these pounds consisted of paper plates. If the paper plates had not had food residue on them, then they would have been recyclable. In addition, food scraps accounted for 8.2 of the 39 pounds, and 6.2 pounds were unopened food. Lastly, 2.4 pounds consisted of recyclable materials.
Drawing conclusions from this data, it was expected that food scraps would make up such a large portion of the waste as Legacy High School does not offer composting options. This being said, it did show how beneficial it would be to set up composting in the future. Looking at the amount of unopened food thrown away, it mainly consisted of apple slices and milk cartons. Now, although there is currently no way to get rid of milk cartons once out of the lunch line, Legacy does offer students the chance to put their uneaten fruit in a box called the “Share Bin.” Throughout lunch, students are welcome to take fruit from the Share Bin to eat. So, these apples were unnecessarily thrown away.
Lastly, analyzing recycling within the cafeteria gets a little complicated. This is because there are no clear recycling bins in it. After asking Legacy High School’s custodians about the issue, it was revealed that the two blue bins in the cafeteria are meant for recycling. However, members of the Environmental Club agreed that they commonly see these bins being used as regular trash cans. With an already small opportunity for recycling within the cafeteria due to food residue, this likely explains why recyclable materials showed up in regular trash bins.
The Kitchen
The last sample of trash that the waste audit covered came from the kitchen. 84 pounds of trash were sorted through, and 9.4 of these pounds consisted of trash for the landfill. Meanwhile, 36.2 pounds of the trash were suitable for recycling. Likewise, another 36.2 pounds could be composted, and the last 1.8 pounds consisted of unopened food.
When looking at this data, it’s incredible to think of how little an amount of trash from the kitchen should be going to the landfill. However, in reality, all 84 pounds of the trash does, recycling included. The Environmental Club speculates that the trash from the kitchen is not being recycled due to two main factors: the kitchen produces a large amount of recyclable materials, but the recycling dumpster is in the parking lot on the opposite side of the school. After all, it would take an incredible amount of time and effort to bring all of the recyclable waste to the appropriate dumpster. So, the Environmental Club is currently brainstorming ways to make it easier on kitchen staff to recycle. Some ideas include having student volunteers take the recycling from the kitchen to the dumpster. Others ask if we could move the recycling, dumpster and all, closer to the kitchen. However, the answer to this problem is still to be determined. Now, when it comes to the shocking amount of compostable waste in the kitchen, it again goes to show how beneficial composting would be at school.
Next Steps
After considering the data collected from the waste audit, the Environmental Club decided to focus on creating a school-wide recycling movement. Although most of the trash within the recycling bin sorted was put there correctly, many recyclables are still being thrown in regular trash cans. So, in the near future, the club will be putting up signs that direct people of what can and can’t be recycled. Keep your eye out for it!
Regarding long-term goals, the Environmental Club hopes that once the school’s recycling has improved, composting can be implemented within the school. Stacy Lambright, Adams 12’s Energy and Sustainability Manager who played a great role in conducting the waste audit, says that 14 schools within the district are currently composting with the intention of becoming Green Star Schools. Green Star Schools, as Eco-Cycle describes them, are schools that divert ⅔ of their waste from landfills by recycling, composting, and reusing their materials. Plus, the City and County of Broomfield is supporting this movement by contributing 10,000 dollars a year to waste reduction within schools.
These goals are small steps toward a brighter future. Through recycling and composting when there’s the chance, waste can be repurposed and given a life as something entirely new. The future of planet Earth depends on this as most waste collected is either incinerated, causing great amounts of greenhouse gas emissions, or placed in landfills. Landfills not only pose a threat of contaminating soil and water near them but also release gases such as methane that are contributing to climate change. By recycling and composting your trash, you can help waste escape these fates.
However, if this doesn’t inspire you, it should be noted that Adams 12 attempted to implement a composting program at Horizon High School. However, this program proved to be a challenge and was put on hold. So, if you’re looking to beat our rivals in a different aspect than sports, the next time you have a plastic bottle in your hands, be the difference and walk a few extra steps to recycle it. Together, we can be the difference.
