Teachers' Resource Pack

for

Keep it Clean

Post Show discussion.

Is it OK to throw some things from the car in the country?
Things like food scraps, surely animals and insects will eat them or they will decompose and enrich the soil.
What about paper? It will eventually break down. It was made from a tree to begin with.

The fact that animals will be attracted to eat the food scraps by the roadside is one of the very reasons why we shouldn't throw food on country roads. The edge of the road is no place for animals to be feeding. If they get hit by a car or truck they will almost certainly die. Even worse, fatal car accidents can happen as drivers swerve to miss animals on the road and crash into ditches and trees.
Paper thrown from cars looks unsightly and driving down a country road littered with paper can seem more like driving through a rubbish tip. You may only throw one small piece of paper but if every one of the tens or hundreds or thousands of people who travel that road every day of the year throw one piece of paper, it soon adds up. Lots of paper, newspapers and boxes can also fuel bush fires helping them to get started.
The only things to do with your rubbish is to recycle it or put it in a rubbish bin.

How much rubbish does your household generate a year ?

How much rubbish does your school / community generate in a year ?

By finding out how much rubbish is taken away from your school and how often it is taken away, and doing some simple mathematics you should be able to get a fairly good idea of how much rubbish is created by your school each year. Be sure to allow for the holidays when the amount of rubbish should decrease. When you have an amount of, for example, 30 of the big dump bins a year, measure the size of the bin, multiply it by the number of times the bin is emptied and compare it to size of your classroom. Would the amount of rubbish dumped by the school each year half fill your classroom, fill your classroom or....... ?

You could do the same exercise with the garbage from home ?
Multiplying your garbage from home each year by the number of houses in the town would give you some idea of the amount of garbage generated by homes in the community. It would only be a rough idea because a house with only one person would generate less rubbish then the house of a large family and of course factories and industries generate a lot more than households. Why not do some calculations, add a little guess work and come up with an amount, then phone the local council. They will probably give you a more accurate figure and you can see how accurate your figure was. (Phone the council first to find out if they have a figure of tonnes or cubic metres.)