Personal Waste Audit

Purpose:

  • Record and calculate approximate waste produced in a week
  • Compare the amounts and types of waste personally produced to local and national values
  • Discuss strategies for reducing personal waste

Procedure:

  1. For one week sort and identify all the trash that your family produces. Each day, measure the volume of all:

  • Paper
  • Plastic
  • Metal
  • Cardboard
  • Clothes and textiles
  • Yard waste
  • Glass
  • Kitchen/food waste
  • Any other disposed materials

  1. Measure and identify trash that you personally dispose of outside of the house (at school, at work, etc…). For example, a Styrofoam lunch tray, apple core, empty glue stick, etc…
  2. Record the information in a table. CAUTION: wear rubber gloves. Take health precautions recording products such as diapers, which can be measured before use.
  3. Approximate large volumes by using buckets or pails of known volume (1-5 gallons, for example). A smaller container can be used for foodstuffs.
  4. Bottles, cans, and other containers should be placed loosely in the measuring container to simulate how they would settle in a landfill.
  1. Estimate your personal volume of waste produced in one week using your data by adding your outside volumes (see step #2) to the total volume of your household waste divided by the number of people in your household.

For example: if my household of four generates 40 gallons of trash in a week and I also generate 5 gallons of trash outside of my home, then 40/4 + 5 = 15 gallons of trash produced by me in a week.

  1. Helpful hints:
  • You may want to start this on the day that your garbage is collected (or taken to the transfer station); that way you begin with an empty can.
  • You can set out separate containers for each of the categories ahead of time and ask your family to use them according to the labels. This may reduce the need for you to get elbow-deep in trash for sorting purposes.

The Report:

You will turn in an audit report that includes the following:

  1. Your data. This includes the data in a tableas well as graphed (a pie chart of relative proportions would be appropriate).
  2. Photographs of your data collection (with captions).
  3. A comparison of yourwaste amounts/proportions to local and national figures. This should be more than just a couple of sentences in length (cite specifics). Provide an MLA citation for the source of your researched local/national figures.

Note: You may need to convert volumes into mass/weight. Please provide an MLA citation for any conversions that you might find and use.

  1. An extrapolation of how much waste you generate in one year. This can be crudely accomplished by multiplying your numbers from one week by 52 (there are 52 weeks in a year). Comment on whether or not this week is representative of the entire year. Why or why not?
  2. An estimation of how much of your waste is recycled. This includes composting.
  3. Reflection: comment on your personal waste generation data. What steps could you take to reduce the waste that goes into a landfill?

Final audit reports are due on Friday, 2/26.