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Big Bin Switch at Mount Pleasant Campus reduces landfill by 30%
An initiative developed and rolled out by Anna Rawlings, the EMS & Resources Officer, Bob Lewis, Campus Manager at SMU’s Mount Pleasant Campus and Steve Donne, Senior Ancillary has reduced the volume of rubbish being sent to landfill from the campus by one third as of February 2009.
The initiative involved the reconfiguration of bins in teaching, office and communal areas throughout the campus. “Traditionally, we have been hugely biased towards making it very easy for staff and students to dispose of their recyclable rubbish to landfill by providing waste paper baskets in every office and classroom, while recycling bins are placed in comparatively inconvenient places in corridors” noted Anna Rawlings. “What we wanted to do was turn this focus on its head by dedicating office and classroom waste baskets for recycling, and making landfill bins less convenient to use.”
According to data collected at Brighton University in 2001, around 98% by volume of the wastes created in classroom and office areas are suitable for recycling in the mixed recycling system at the three partnering Universities. Despite this, on average the partnership only recycles around 30% of its waste each year.
The Big Bin Switch was rolled out by consulting with cleaners and the Health and Safety Officer, conducting an audit of the bins currently in situ and the changes that needed to be made, providing new bins where they were needed, labelling all the bins with stickers designed by the EMS & Resources Officer, and communicating the changes to all staff.
“I’m really happy” said Bob Lewis, “within just a couple of weeks, I’ve had to ask our waste contractor to replace two of our 1100 litre wheelie bins for landfill recycling ones as we just weren’t using them, but were running out of space to put all the recycling.”
“The two wheelie bins that were removed had been emptied three times a week, and would have contained around 70kg of waste each time they were emptied” explains Anna Rawlings. “We can safely assume that the Switch has secured a diversion from landfill of over 400kg a week, or around 15 tonnes per teaching year. So I’d be very keen to see similar systems being rolled out across Swansea University, Trinity and SMU’s other campuses.”