Celebrating Ten Years of Waste Sorting in the Community

Hi Jennifer,
The type of celebration that you organize will depend on your budget, of course, but I think that holding one or a series of community events with free food would be a good use of resources (the food will draw people). If you want to ensure that the community remains committed, consider highlighting recycling champions from each of the local government areas. These would be residents who are doing an excellent job at sorting and who have agreed to be part of the celebration. For those who can't make it, you could do a write up in a newsletter and distribute it for others in the neighbourhood to see that their peers are committed to sorting properly. This will help strengthen the norm in your community. I hope this helps.

I suggest you create a visual representation of how the numbers of waste diverted (each year and over the full decade) from the regular landfill fate, have added up to big results for the community and environment.  Presumably you have access to measurements or (good reasonable estimates) of the quantities of materials that were able to be recycled or composted (vs. landfilled) for the ten years.  Depending on how detailed this information is, you can compare it not just in terms of the simple volume or kg of mass diverted, but in other meaningful terms that consumers can relate to.    Think of showing the avoided greenhouse gas emissions (CO2 savings from recycling of metal and paper vs. making the amount of new products from virgin stock), the avoided water usage (from recycling vs. making the materials from virgin stock), and avoided methane emissions from keeping compostable waste out of the landfill (which also can equate back to CO2 emissions footprint).  From there you can compare the quantities to some meaningful thing that people value in the community.  Such as what carbon pollution would be saved by a growing healthy tree over a year's time, or the water or energy used by a typical household.  The value here is in showing how individual actions add up, and collectively the community actions REALLY add up, for the good of everyone and the planet. Have fun with your celebration, and in seeing where you all can go in the next five years with making further progress in the community's efforts for sustainability and reducing of the waste footprints!