Trash Sort
Sorting trash sounded pretty interesting to me. My friend (and coworker) Leigh is working on a fun side project at work. She and others have been keeping tabs on how well the company overall sorts its trash into 3 different bins. Trash, recycling, and compost (organics) are the three bins around all the corporate building. These are to help separate trash into the appropriate bins, which is always a challenge with people not fully understanding what goes where. So after the bins have been up for a year or so, they decided to take everything from one day and see how well we are doing.
Yup, this means opening up a days worth of trash to see how well we have been doing. Overall, we have 174 bags with 60 being organics/compost (green tint bags), 77 recycling (clear or blue), and 37 trash (black) for a total weight of 1355 pounds. The numbers breakdown into 560# organics, 368# recycling, and 427# trash this is all before we opened up any of the bags to see what is really what. Let’s take a closer look at the numbers
Trash: 427# in total with 32% of that actually being trash. The rest could have technically gone in the recycling or compost bins.
Recycling: 368# in total with 66% of it actually being trash. That means 243# of what we thought is recycling is actually trash or organics/compost
Organics/Compost: 560# with only 5% being non organics, which is pretty sweet and we have the ability to get that to 100%!
Overall, the numbers don’t lie and we were very surprised to see how much trash can actually be recycled or composted. In comparison we can see how much recycling actually needs to go into the other bins. This mean we need to spend some more time bringing awareness on what can actually go where, target the main offenders, and make up some pictures to show what can go where. This also means we could potential change our pickup habits, since trash gets picked up daily but clearly we have more recycling than anything. Pretty crazy to spend the time and looking closer at what we are doing as a company overall. There are areas for improvements and the group is excited to share these results and future training.
Read MoreYup, this means opening up a days worth of trash to see how well we have been doing. Overall, we have 174 bags with 60 being organics/compost (green tint bags), 77 recycling (clear or blue), and 37 trash (black) for a total weight of 1355 pounds. The numbers breakdown into 560# organics, 368# recycling, and 427# trash this is all before we opened up any of the bags to see what is really what. Let’s take a closer look at the numbers
Trash: 427# in total with 32% of that actually being trash. The rest could have technically gone in the recycling or compost bins.
Recycling: 368# in total with 66% of it actually being trash. That means 243# of what we thought is recycling is actually trash or organics/compost
Organics/Compost: 560# with only 5% being non organics, which is pretty sweet and we have the ability to get that to 100%!
Overall, the numbers don’t lie and we were very surprised to see how much trash can actually be recycled or composted. In comparison we can see how much recycling actually needs to go into the other bins. This mean we need to spend some more time bringing awareness on what can actually go where, target the main offenders, and make up some pictures to show what can go where. This also means we could potential change our pickup habits, since trash gets picked up daily but clearly we have more recycling than anything. Pretty crazy to spend the time and looking closer at what we are doing as a company overall. There are areas for improvements and the group is excited to share these results and future training.
