Waste Management – Griffith University Event

About This Project

Overview

Every year the Griffith University student body hire the Gold Coast Event Centre to host upwards of 3,500 students during a scheduled Gold Coast Turf Club (GCTC) live horse racing event. This student party is held every year & creates a huge amount of waste for a one-day event. To give an example, 13,000 beer cans had been sold during this event.

Our client had requested that we used this event as a trial run to implement any strategies that may help the GCTC waste management in becoming more effective & streamline during large events. One major concern was the level of rubbish that remains onsite once an event is over.

Solution

Our team worked with all stakeholders involved to arrange a temporary onsite waste compound with the help of Suez, the waste removal company. Our team implemented a waste management strategy that would have the rubbish immediately separated into each allocated recyclable & non-recyclable waste streams during the event. The non-recyclable general waste was to be taken away from site during the event instead of delaying it to 2 or 3 days later. We placed 3 types of bins throughout the event space for the students to use:

• • 1 bin type clearly marked “General Waste’
  • 1 bin type clearly marked recycling
  • 1 bin type clearly marked as “Cans Only”

Our team organised with Suez to have a rubbish removal truck onsite during the peak hours of the event to take the general waste directly from the 240ltr bins.

Challenge

The event was held during an usually busy Saturday race day for the GCTC, which would easily have a customer crowd of 1500-2000 punters. This created the challenge of ensuring that the repeat customers and GCTC  were given a normal, clean & tidy race day at the track alongside the 3,500 ready to party University students.

Outcome

A successful event was achieved through excellent pre-planning and preparation of 3 main strategies.

1. 1. 1. Using 3 clearly marked bins throughout the inside of event
      2. Setting up a temporary waste compound for live sorting during the event
      3. Working with Suez to have a rubbish truck live onsite during the peak times to remove the non-recyclable waste as it was generated.

The outstanding achievement was our separation of beer cans sold during the event by a simple trick of placing “Cans Only’ labelled bins throughout the inside of the venue. Our waste compound sorting team was able to save 10,466 of the 13,000 Beer cans sold during the event from general waste. This netted over an 80% success rate of recycled beer cans. Our team delivered the cans to the recycling program “Containers for Change” which gave our client GCTC, a cash refund of $1,045.00.

This financial incentive to implement a recycling program for our client has shown major plus for future events at the Gold Coast Event Centre.