We had a few questions about waste.
A bunch of parents, volunteers, staff and students conducted an experiment in the lunch room. Instead of throwing all our garbage into one big bin . . .
- Recyclable materials
- Compostable food
- Lunch trays
- Trash
- Do milk cartons and juice boxes get treated the same?
- If the plastic doesn’t have a number on it, is it still recyclable?
- Is paper considered trash, recyclable or compost?
- . . . and many others
All the lunch periods combined produce an average of 70 punds of garbage per day!
Everyone did a really good job and we learned a lot. Check out the charts and pictures on the next pages. And stay tuned because . . .
We still have lots of questions!
What waste do we produce?
Our initial survey indicates that the lunch room alone produces on average almost 70 pounds of garbage each day.!That’s about eight bags full including two giant bags of styrofoam lunch trays.
Sometimes it looked and smelled pretty gross.
When we were done, the garbage bags took a bow.
Where does our waste go?
What happens next?
At the incinerator everything gets burned. The residual ash is transported to a landfill. Energy that is generated from the burning is captured and sold.The process diagram might look something like this:
At the recycling plant things get sorted out, re-bundled, and sold. The bundled recycled material goes to places as far as North Carolina, Canada, Mexico and even India!
The process might look something like this:
Here's how much waste we produce in one week at Brackett.
