Sometimes you and your staff won’t have the time to delve too much into the details of litter, to generate a baseline, or create a site profile by establishing some historical trends.
Often you will be looking for an immediate action, or perhaps a couple of actions that can address a local litter issue, manage it so you can move onto the next problem on your list.
The Size, Age, Origin, Impact & Effort analysis (S-A-O-I-E) is a method that I developed to help interpret litter at any site, during the first visit. It’s a series of things to look at that will tell you much of what you need to know about litter which assist’s when deciding what type’s of actions may be required to improve the location.
A quick summary of the S-A-O-I-E;
– Size – how big is the litter? If it can be seen from 10 metres, it’s large, if not its small.
– Age – there are only two options, fresh, within the last three to five days or mature, anything older.
– Origin – simply put what route did the litter take to get where it is.
– Impact – is understanding how harmful the litter is to business, people, the environment, and behaviours.
– Effort – Whats it going to take to manage the current litter and reduce future incidents of littering at and around the site
This time the site has no visible large litter. Large litter is a major player in messy public spaces.
There are two pieces of knowledge that you will need to make the system work;
1. An understanding of your council’s tolerance for litter, this is what amount of litter is considered bearable and what amount is unacceptable. You have to approach this from a realists point of view, simply saying zero is unrealistic in most public spaces. – Keep a lookout for a posting on “How much can a Mayor bear?”
2. A sound knowledge of your council’s litter management capabilities will be required to apply the E, ‘effort’ component of the analytical tool.
With those two bits of knowledge, you can now tailor the spreadsheet to reflect your local council’s expectations.
Our free spreadsheet to help you analyse litter
The S-A-O-I-E analysis is broken into a couple of sections.
The S & A can be interpreted using the Excel template that has been developed.(email your details for a free copy with explanation notes) This spreadsheet will help with size and age of litter, the counts, percentages of stream and ratings.
The O & I are both determined onsite via observations and understanding of your council and communities tolerance of litter.
With the S-A-O-I assessed you should be well informed about the litter and its impacts. If you have an understanding, a knowledge of your council’s capabilities you can start to determine the appropriate E, effort.
That’s how the spreadsheet, tolerance and understanding work’s on a desktop, now for the fun part.
Getting on site and analysing litter;
Once you have arrived at any site, a quick visual inspection should give you a pretty good understanding of the area. These are a few things to look for that will get you started, but are in no way exclusive;
– Entry and exit points to the site
– Pedestrian pathways
– Gathering points
– Man-made features
– Natural features
– Litter generators
– Surfaces
When you are ready to start with the data collection, I suggest a simple tally app or similar, the one I’ve used for years is Cattail.nu Counter by Theresa L Ford, it costs less than $2.00 and is available in the app store. It’s easy enough to configure into the fields you want to count, and from there the data can be populated into the S-A-O-I-E spreadsheet.
You would only have five fields in your count;
Find and use a simple tally app to simplify your field work and data capture
Large Litter – Fresh
Large Litter – Mature
Small Litter – Fresh
Small – Litter Mature
X1 – Hazardous Litter
On any site simply establish a count zone, this would normally be the area with the most litter. I recommend a large area of at least sixty square metres; any configuration will be OK. Unlike a traditional litter count, this system is looking for an action to follow; it is not so much capturing data – it’s more interrupting the litter as your seeing it and where you see it.
The system is relatively straightforward, and it can be tailored to individual councils tolerance to litter. To help readers clearly understand the process, a different posting for each of the five points of consideration, S-A-O-I-E which be published to explain them in detail.
Please keep an eye out at Waste Ad Space in the free litter prevention blog, or contact me at paul@wasteadspace.com.au for a free copy of the S-A-O-I-E spreadsheet. I’m happy to take people through the process and if there are any questions, just contact me directly.