As part of the activities planned for the first week (see the previous post), we have managed to gather data on the food wastage of our school from 10.30 am to 11.40 am.
Even getting the equipment needed from the school laboratories was not easy. Spring balances were required for the weighing of the bags used in the bins - not aware that we had to inform the labs 1 week before obtaining equipment, we ran into some administrative issues. Eventually, we managed to settle this, and got the items we needed - gloves and the spring balances.
Seeing as it was the first time an environmental audit had ever taken place in our school (let alone the analysis of canteen food wastage), we were unsure of how successful this was going to be. What if something went wrong? What if students were uncooperative with us in the audit?
Persuading the students to throw their food waste into the allocated bins was no piece of cake. As certain bins did not have any bags in them at times (we had to dispose of them after weighing them), we had to stop students from disposing their waste in those bins. Some of them did despite this - causing some complications in the cleaning up of the bins.
Either way, we still managed to get the measurements we needed*:
Time Amount of waste in trash bins/kg Predominant waste items 10.30-10.50am 2.7 Rice 10.50-11.00am 1.3 Rice, bones 11.00-11.10am 1.5 Rice, soup 11.10-11.30am 2.1 Rice, curry 11.30-11.40am 1.3 Rice, bones
Most commonly disposed food item: Rice
Average rate at which food waste is produced: 0.178kg/min (to 3 significant figures) As you may have seen, our school produces about 178 grams of waste per minute - that's averaging about 11kg an hour! Counting in the hours the students start flooding the canteen, we would produce about 220kg in a week. That would mean an average of 8.5 tonnes a year (assuming each term is 10 weeks long and each school week is 5 days long). Our group is currently researching into methods on tackling this problem - we will put up more information next Monday. *Research carried out by Tan Wei Liang Byorn, Gabriel Manuel Sidik and Low Zhen Jie on 16 May 2008, 10.30am - 11.40am, in the NUS High School of Mathematics and Science. No part of this may be reproduced without prior permission of 23-59.
posted @ 8:19 PM |
