Waste Audits Assignment - Conducting a (Small Scale) Waste Audit
Your objective: Complete an audit of waste at a particular point along the waste stream which will provide important information to improve the management of such waste, particularly the potential for waste reduction.
Reading & Preparation: before commencing the audit, make sure you have read the background notes and other resources available on the unit web site.
Selecting what to Audit: basically this will be your choice and will largely depend on what is available in the area you live, and/or what resources you can find (libraries, internet etc).
The main rule is to keep it simple and small (this is not a major assignment!). You will most likely be estimating the quantity and type of waste at a particular point along the waste stream. This could be at the point waste enters the waste stream (eg what goes into bins), or along the waste stream (eg collation point, kerbside collection, consolidation into large bins etc) or at end of stream (eg landfill site).
Some examples are:
- waste entering bins (of various sorts) within your home
- waste collected for pick-up along your street, neighbourhood or apartment block etc
- waste generated at your workplace, work building, office(s)
- waste disposed of at park (both into and outside bins)
- waste disposed of at an event (organised function, picnic, party)
- waste disposed of at end of waste stream (most likely from data collected by waste management agency and/or through visual estimates)
How to Conduct the Waste Audit: obviously you can't collect, separate and measure all the waste of a waste stream - this would be extremely time consuming and difficult. Therefore we will be taking only a few sub-samples, but these will be chosen strategically to ensure they are representative of the waste stream. Generally this would involve sampling a small, but representative, portion of the waste stream on a few typical days. Obviously avoiding abnormal times (eg public holidays) and situations (eg garbage collector strike) make sense here.
You need to estimate the quantity of waste in your sub-samples. This will typically be quite crude and involve a volume estimate (this can be easy if you know the volume of the bins you are dealing with) or weight measurement (eg bathroom or kitchen scales) - however try to be consistent in presenting the data as either by weight or by volume.
You also need to quantify the main types of waste in the stream - these will typically be various types of recyclables (glass, aluminium, steel/tin cans, cloth, plastics, various types of paper), organics (kitchen and garden waste) and other types. The readings and other waste audits will give you ideas on how to classify and sort your waste. Again this may involve simple visual estimates of the proportion or volume of waste in each waste class, or physical sorting and quantification of the different types. If you go for waste separation and sorting, please be aware of safety issues (see below) and don't under-estimate the time needed (I would recommend very small sub-samples, but be as representative as possible).
Many useful hints for conducting audits are given in the readings for this module.
Health, Safety and Privacy Concerns: this is very important. If you are physically sorting waste, make sure you wear thick protective gloves, enclosed footwear (preferably boots) and protective/old clothes. If there is a risk of needle stick injury, even it's a remote chance, please do not sort waste with your hands (ie rely on visual volume estimation).
Solid waste can also be smelly and visually unpleasant. Please be prepared for this and conduct your waste sorting in an appropriate place (eg outside).
Also you shouldn't be sorting through other peoples waste without their permission, or agreement from the appropriate managers.
Preliminary Plan: Please email me what you plan to audit and how you propose to go about doing this. I will give you feedback and hints if necessary.
What to Present: You will need to write a brief report which covers:
1) Introduction - In which you out your audit into context and clearly describe your audit objective(s).
2) Summary of methodology
3) Results with data - Presented in appropriate graphs and/or tables, as well short description/summary of results in words as.
4) Discussion - Two paragraphs on what the results mean and how they compare to similar studies - for instance if you have done a household waste audit, how do data compare for a typical household of your country or city? Some web searching here may be required. (NB Remember you will be exploring the full implications of the results in other modules).
Attachment:- Assignment Files.rar