General Waste

Packaging Audit

In this activity you can find out the amount of packaging brought into your home each week.

What to Do:

1. Tell the people in your home you will be looking at the packaging around the products they buy each week.  You will be counting the number of layers of packaging around each product and analyzing what the packaging is made from.  Ask the people in your home to help you do this.
2. Design a standard sheet for each pupil in the class to use to record the items bought each week.  It should show how many loose items were bought, how many packaged items, how many layers of packaging each had, what these layers were made from eg card/paper/plastic/aluminium foil/glass and whether the packaging could be recycled or reused or not.
3. Accompany an adult to the shops.  Look at the various types of packaging.  Choose one example of a product you feel is over packaged.  Take the packaging to school as an example.
4. After one week the teacher may collect all the record sheets.  You can now study them as a class to find out:
• The ratio of loose to packaged items
• The average amount of packaging
• Which packaging material is used most often
• How much of the packaging can be recycled?
• How much of the packaging can be reused?
5. Display your results as graphs.

Extension Activities:

• What does over-packaging mean?
• How many examples of over-packaging did your class find?
• What percentage of your weekly household waste is packaging?
• Why is packaging important?
• Can you think of items where increasing the packaging decreases the amount of overall waste?  For example, what would happen if eggs were sold in paper bags instead of cardboard or plastic boxes?
• Find out what (if anything) industry is doing to reduce the amount of packaging waste.
• List ways in which you could reduce the amount of packaging waste thrown away in your home.