Home Waste Audit

Want to challenge yourself to reduce household waste and increase your waste literacy?

Try our Home Waste Audit!

The Home Waste Audit is designed to increase waste literacy among participants, particularly regarding local waste management systems and how local residential waste impacts the global waste footprint. Residential waste is an important piece of the plastic cycle, and how we produce and dispose of our waste affects the amount of plastic pollution in aquatic ecosystems.

Objectives:

Learn about the waste stream in the municipality where you live. i.e., learn what bins you have (e.g., recycling, landfill, organics) and what goes in each of them.
Decrease your waste footprint and divert waste away from landfill by procuring and using products that you can reuse/recycle.

Ultimately, throughout this project, you will be tracking your waste with a goal to reduce the amount heading to the landfill.

Interested in participating?

How it works:

It’s easy, all you need is access to the internet, some paper (bonus if you use scrap paper), a pencil/pen, and a healthy dash of motivation. Make sure to watch our Introductory Webinar (below) for instructions and background on WHY to take part.

The Home Waste Audit takes four weeks and can be done anytime, either by yourself or with a group of friends, family or colleagues. We provide the datasheets and instructions to log your waste and four short online surveys to help track your waste literacy and behaviour.

Instructions and materials:

Instructional Guide
Datasheets: Landfill Waste; Recycling Waste
Surveys: Survey 1, Survey 2, Survey 3
Waste Reduction Tips
Certificate of Completion

Outcomes

Our Home Waste Audit demonstrates how waste management differs between municipalities, provinces and countries, and how different people generate and dispose of their waste. It measures how much waste we divert from the landfill, and characterizes how our waste changes over the 4-week timeframe. Ultimately, the Home Waste Audit asks questions that help us understand whether we are seeding behaviours that stick and help build the pathways for a long-term impact.