Monitoring and key metrics

Our monitoring programme measures the quantity of waste from university operations sent to landfill, as well as the quantities of materials recovered for recycling or sent for composting. These data are provided by our waste contractors, who weigh our bins as part of their collection service.

Every few years we also conduct an audit of general waste and container recycling bins. We collect samples from selected sites and explore the composition of these samples, including the proportions of recoverable materials destined for landfill, and contamination rates in our container recycling stream. The composition data helps us to make assumptions about the total quantities of different waste types, whatever their pathway through the supply chain. Sampling from diverse sites also enables us to explore trends in different parts of the university. For instance, we look at accommodation buildings through a different lens to the rest of the university, as their waste streams are more comparable to residential waste.

By developing increasingly nuanced waste submetrics, we can better understand waste and contamination hot spots and important avenues for interventions. We also use intensity-based metrics (e.g., how much of each stream we generate per person). Looking at trends across the institution and over time helps us to interpret the effectiveness of waste prevention interventions and make decisions about where we need to focus our attention.

*This total includes food waste that is recovered for composting in commercial kitchens (24.7 tonnes). It also includes an estimate of the total quantity of food in our general waste to landfill stream (338.1 tonnes) and container recycling stream (6.4 tonnes), excluding student accommodation buildings. Estimates were calculated based on the results of our most recent waste audit conducted in May 2024, which found that food scraps made up 38.9% of the landfill stream, and 6% of the container recycling stream, from non-accommodation buildings.

Te Taumata Tukuwaro-kore Net Zero Strategy includes a 50% reduction target for the waste arising from consumption by 2030. This target includes not only waste to landfill, but also the materials recovered for recycling and composting.

While it is promising to see a slight reduction in overall waste to landfill, the upward trends in total operational waste signal that more work is needed to shift policies and practices and engage our many suppliers.