A waste audit is a simple way to figure out where you can start reducing your waste. It can be hard to pin point what you’re throwing away the most, and is often why people find reducing their waste so hard. This activity gives you a simple way to understand your waste, an will give you an idea what areas you can start reducing in. I recently completed a waste audit, as I felt I could be doing better, and found out there was a big part of my life that was causing majority of my waste!
When you’re completing a waste audit, you pretty much just write down everything that you throw away, and categorise it into four different waste types:
- Edibles and Food and Scraps
- Plastic
- Other Packaging (tin cans, cardboard ect.)
- Other
And it should look something like this:
So when you throw something out, you write down what it was in the appropriate box. Make your sheet an A4 size piece of paper, or even some scrap cardboard, and keep it near the bin so you don’t forget. You can do this for however long you want. I recently did one for a week, and found out that most of my waste was coming from food scraps. So now we’ve started to compost our food scraps.
The idea of this is to show you how much your throwing away, and gives you a starting point to eliminate waste. You may chose to start with the category that has the most items in it, or start small and work your way up! Where you go from there is completely up to you!
As always, any questions can be sent to me via the contact page, or through my Instagram page @The_BlueScientist
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