A waste audit conducted earlier this month at Carman Collegiate yielded some surprising results. In an effort to measure the school's environmental footprint, four students collected twenty-three bags of garbage and ten bags of recycling over three days and then sorted the recycling and compostable materials from the actual garbage items.

Kim Nicolajsen was one of the coordinators, she says a climate change summit back in April was the inspiration behind the assessment.

"There was a lot of other students there who gave us different ideas but we thought that a waste audit would be the easiest way to improve the recycling system in our school."

Of the one hundred-twenty pounds in garbage collected; twenty-one pounds was paper, ten was compost, seven was cans and six pounds was plastic, meaning thirty-six per cent of the garbage was either material that could have been recycled or composted.

According to the audit, the average student puts over eighty-two pounds of items into the garbage in one year, this could be reduced to fifty-two pounds per student per year if they recycled. This would result in 8,500 less pounds in the landfill.

Nicolajsen says the Enviro-Thon club will use education and awareness to encourage students to further reduce their waste in the school. "It is an issue but no one really pays attention to it, it's one of the issues that don't really get discussed that much."

Another audit will be held in one year's time to see if anything has changed.