There are many litter related activities that you can undertake at school. In this section it is assumed that the activities are being undertaken by a class but many of them can be adapted for a whole school event or a smaller group such as an eco group or environment club. Most of the activities can also be adapted to suit different ages and abilities. Further guidance and information is available from the 'Litter Education Support Officer' or from the publications listed under Useful Publications.
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Litter survey
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Litter pick
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Litter campaigns
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Questionnaires
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Design a bin
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Waste free lunch
Litter survey
A litter survey is one of the best ways of introducing the litter topic to your class. The pupils can take on as many of the decisions as you feel appropriate, depending on the time available and their ability. They can be involved in some quite detailed problem solving in deciding how to go about the survey, what information they want to get out of it and the methodology. The survey results can provide vast amounts of data to be used for displays, assemblies, newsletters, presentations and to help in deciding the next stage in their litter campaign.
For more detailed information go to Teachers information sheet 1: Litter survey|.
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Litter pick
A litter pick can be carried out in conjunction with a survey or independently. Even if a simple litter pick is carried out it should still be possible to generate some discussions with pupils about particular problem areas or types and sources of litter. They might also be able to come up with some potential solutions to try.
Teachers information sheet 2: Litter pick| provides guidance on how to organise a litter pick.
Litter pick risk assessment| provides a starting point for your risk assessment. This should be amended and extended to take account of the particular circumstances of the proposed litter pick.
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Litter campaigns
If litter is a problem either inside or outside your school the pupils might be keen to take action to improve the environment. A campaign can be something as basic as putting up posters around the school. These can be designed on the computer or simply with paint, pens or collage.
If the problem is outside the school it might be useful to start with a survey to highlight the main issues of concern. To get the message across to others in the community use posters, newsletters, notice boards in libraries and shops in addition to any existing methods of communication.
Pupils should be able to come up with their own solutions to the litter problems identified and can then use notice boards, assemblies, newsletters and other methods to spread the message throughout the school. Litter picking rotas at break times are often popular and some schools use reward (or penalty) schemes to encourage the use of bins.
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Questionnaires
Questionnaires are a great way of extending the litter topic beyond the classroom. They can be used to investigate the attitudes of children and/or adults to litter and can be used inside the school or in the community.
A questionnaire can also be used to link to people in the past topics. Pupils can devise a questionnaire to use at home or in the community to find out how perceptions of litter and the causes of litter have changed over time. Parents and grandparents provide a valuable source of information about how packaging, eating habits and other social habits have changed over the years and their effect on litter and the environment.
The advantage of this type of exercise is that it gets other members of the community involved and therefore spreads the anti littering message outside of the school gates.
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Design a bin
This can make an exciting art and craft or design project for children of different ages and abilities. A paper exercise could look at designing bins to accept different types of litter i.e. how can the disposal of chewing gum, cigarettes, recyclable waste and other litter be made easier and more efficient?
For younger children the project could be just to design a colourful bin that would attract people to use it, again as a paper exercise. For older pupils suitable paints could be used to decorate existing bins to make them more attractive and noticeable.
Design and technology students could take litter disposal as a project and follow through from the ideas and paper stage to actually producing their bin to see if it works. Looking at litter bins in detail will help pupils to appreciate some of the problems associated with them such as vandalism, wind and rain, vermin and wasps, capacity, servicing and maintenance of bins, cost (often £100 - £200 and much more) and positioning.
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Waste-free lunch
Many schools try the waste free lunch| as part of their work on waste minimisation. It involves challenging children (and their parents) to provide a packed lunch that creates as little waste as possible. The result should be less plastic bottles, crisp packets, sweet papers, yoghurt pots etc. to throw away and possibly more compost for the compost bin.
It can be interesting to use this idea when looking at litter. Comparisons can be made by weighing the amount of waste created on an ‘ordinary’ lunch day and that created on a waste free lunch day. Alternatively on a healthy eating week you may run a healthy tuck shop and ban crisps. Compare the amount of litter and waste generated during an ordinary week and that resulting from a ‘healthy’ week. It can often be found that a spin off from healthy eating promotion is a reduction in the amount of litter created.
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