Eliminating litter at your school!

Litter into microplastics

When you see litter on the ground at school, do you know where it goes? Does it get picked up? What about if it doesn’t get picked up? Do you know what happens to it then? Waste that is picked up and put in the bin is taken to landfills, which are big sites where waste is buried in the ground. Most of the waste in landfill will take hundreds of years to decompose back to organic matter, and it is thought that some waste types may never degrade at all.

Litter that is not picked up will end up in the ocean, or other large bodies of water and become marine debris. Marine debris can come from ocean activities such as fishing and shipping, but most marine debris comes from sources on land – such as your school! Debris is carried by the wind and travels in storm drains, canals and rivers into the ocean. Even litter that makes it to landfills can be blown by the wind into waterways and end up in the ocean.

Plastic litter is one of our biggest problems. Most of the plastics we use are single-use which means they are used only once before they are thrown away. Can you think of some examples of single-use plastic that you use every day? Plastics can take up to 1000 years to degrade but some scientists believe that they may never break down. When plastics degrade, they don’t really go away, they simply break down into smaller and smaller pieces, becoming microplastics. Watch this video to find out why microplastics are such a big problem:

We can reduce litter by making sure our waste goes into the right bins and by reducing the amount of waste we create in the first place. We are going to find out which areas in your school have the most litter and come up with a plan to eliminate litter for good!

Who are the EPA?



EPA Victoria’s mission is to protect all Victorians (humans and animals!) from pollution and waste. Pollution and waste can occur in the air, on land, and in our waters. At EPA we have a team of expert scientists that monitor the environment and recommend solutions to reduce and eliminate pollution and waste.



  • Your mission is to become an EPA scientist for the day and take action against litter at your school.
  • We are going to design a litter survey to see which areas of your school have the most litter and why.
  • Then, you will come up with a plan to reduce waste and litter.
  • In a month we will repeat the survey to see how well your plan worked!


Your Survey Design

Decide how/what to survey

  1. Now it’s time to design your survey! To do a litter survey, you will need to mark out rectangular areas of your school to survey litter – this will be called your survey areas. You will need to decide the following:
  • Where will your survey locations be?
  • How many locations will you survey?
  • How big will the survey areas be
  1. What sorts of things do you think might affect the amount of litter at your school? For example:
  • Where bins are located?
  • Where people eat lunch?
  • Trees/plants?
  • Other??

Decide what features you think are important. We are going to map these out later in the activity.

  1. Note down which areas in your school you think will have the most and least litter.

Creating a map of your school

  1. To be able to visualise the results of your survey, you first need to map out your school. We are also going to draw important features on the map using draw.io. Open the draw.io weblink. When a prompt box appears click ‘decide later’. This will then open the main drawing window.

  1. Click on the layers icon to bring up the layer window. We are going to create a few layers so you can easily look at different features on your map. If you double click the layer name, in this case, “background” you can rename the layer – we’re going to call ours “Base Map”.

  1. Now go to google maps and search for your school (e.g. Balnarring Primary School). Click on the box in the bottom left hand corner that says “Map”. If the box says “Satellite” then you do not need to click the box. Using the ‘Microsoft snipping tool’, copy the map of your school into the main drawing window of draw.io.

    Optional: you might want to use the “measure distance” function (right click in google maps) to measure the size of your school grounds. This could be useful when planning your waste survey.

  1. Now we will create another layer to map out the key outdoor features on your school grounds. You can do this by clicking the “plus” in the layer window. Rename this layer “Outdoor Features”. Then, using the shapes in the left-hand toolbar, add in the important outdoor features at your school. Hint: you can use the satellite image to help you: click the box in the bottom left called “satellite” to show the satellite image.

  1. We will repeat this process, adding the following layers:
  • Areas that you hypothesised will have high amounts of litter and areas you think will have low amounts of litter. Rename this layer “Hypothesis”.
  • Your planned survey areas (remember, these will be rectangles!) Rename this layer “Survey Areas”
  • Finally, add layers to show the features of interest that you have decided are important to your analysis and rename the layers accordingly. In this example, we have mapped “Bins” and “Lunch Areas”.