Trashcans lined with plastic liners are located throughout colleges and universities in offices, classrooms, food service areas, etc. For a large school, with hundreds of staff and thousands of workers, there likely are several thousand trashcans—once again, all lined with plastic liners that need to be changed two or three times per week, if not more. That’s a lot of plastics liners.
While trash liners are not necessarily an expensive item, for instance, in a small to moderate sized office, for a large college campus, they quickly become a significant cost factor. Further, if the school is sustainability focused, as so many are today, finding ways to reduce the number of plastic liners used on an annual basis will help the school make a sizable dent in its environmental footprint.
When it comes to the use of plastic liners, school administrators should know that the latest version of LEED (V4) does not require the use of recycled or recyclable liners. This may come as a surprise to many, but the reasoning behind this decision, according to the U.S. Green Building Council, which is the developer of the LEED program, is that manufacturers have simply not been able to develop recycled or recyclable liners that are dependable and durable enough to be used in commercial facilities.
But trash liners, used in not only schools but commercial facilities, grocery and retail stores, and other locations can have a detrimental impact on the environment. According to the Worldwatch Institute, nearly 300 million tons of plastic were produced in 2013, much of it used as trash liners, ending up in landfills around the globe. Further, school administrators should be aware of the following:
- Some reports indicate that plastic liners can take more than 300 years to decompose in a landfill fully.
- As plastic liners decompose, they can release methane gas. Methane gas makes up as much as 90 percent of the gas released from landfills, is flammable, and concentrations released from landfills can exceed dangerous levels.
- Related to this, some liners considered “environmentally friendly” are still petroleum-based, made of some petrochemicals; these liners still can take several years to decay and release methane emissions in the degrading process.
Liner Reduction Implementation
Because there can be so many “win-wins” if a college or university can reduce the number of trash liners used, many are quite willing to establish a pilot program to come up with solutions. We did this with one of our clients with a large corporate campus. However, the steps and procedures we took can work just as well on a college campus.
One of the first things the contract cleaners or school custodians will want to know is if reducing or eliminating the need for plastic trashcan liners will add to the cleaning crews time and labor. Professional cleaning is very time and labor focused, any additional time to perform certain duties can have an impact on the cost of cleaning, especially if this is a large campus.
To address this issue, we conducted time studies with our client and uncovered the following:
- It takes approximately 30 seconds to collect a trash can and place its debris in larger containers for disposal
- It takes another 30 seconds to remove and replace the liner in the garbage can and return it to the workstation.
We also found that taking the same steps but eliminating the plastic liner entirely took about the same amount of time. The only problems we encountered were when “wet” items were placed in trashcans. And, one “wet” food item we have encountered —oatmeal—can be particularly troublesome.
Our client, as well as many college campuses, serve their staff and students oatmeal for breakfast in the morning. If the oatmeal is later deposited into trashcans without plastic liners, it slowly hardens. By the time cleaning begins in the evening, the oatmeal has hardened to the point that the trash can needs to be scrubbed clean.
We addressed this situation by replacing each trash can caked with dried oatmeal with an entirely new trash can. Then, the dried oatmeal cans were cleaned together at the end of the shift and reused the next day. Our time studies found this had minimal impact on time, helping to promote the goal of reducing, if not eliminating, the use of plastic liners and their related costs.
If starting a liner elimination pilot program such as this sounds promising, school administrators should not be surprised if there is some “push back” from the cleaning staff. Change in a work setting, especially a large work environment, can be difficult and we have found this to be true regardless of whether the workers are employees of a contract cleaning company or hired by the school directly.
Push back can be addressed with education. Remind employees that the goals of the program are: to promote sustainability; to protect the environment; and to reduce the use of natural resources. What can be called a “sustainability culture” has been evolving in North America over the past decade, so these issues often resonate well with many workers.
As the pilot program discussed above, it proved very successful and is now being implemented throughout the corporate campus. In most cases, only kitchen and food service areas of a facility still need plastic liners, eliminating thousands of liners used previously.
As you can imagine, cost savings can be considerable. Further, a huge amount of storage space has now become available; this is the space that was once used to hold hundreds and hundreds of cases of plastic liners. I’m sure most school administrator can find many other uses for that storage space than boxes of trashcan liners.
Ron Segura is founder and president of Segura & Associates, an international janitorial consulting company based in the U.S. He has over 45 years of experience in all segments of the cleaning industry with ten of those years spent overseeing the cleaning of over 4.5 million square feet for The Walt Disney Company. Ron can be contacted through his company website at www.seguraassociates.com
