In January 2013, Metro Trains Melbourne (Metro Trains) began an educational Waste & Recycling poster campaign at selected metropolitan Melbourne train stations. EnviroCom was appointed to conduct audits to evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign and to inform future actions.
EnviroCom conducted a pre-education audit in October 2012 to establish a baseline. The post-education audit was conducted in April 2013, three months after the implementation of the educational poster campaign.

The audits involved a site assessment (station cleanliness, condition of bin infrastructure, number and location of bins), visual litter count and bin inspections (% fullness, % contamination and % resource loss), as well as collection and segregation of recycling and garbage bin contents according to the Australian Waste Database (AWD) categories.

From pre- to post-education, there was found to be an increase in the mass of recyclables being presented to the comingled recycling stream and a decrease in the mass of contamination of the recycling stream – both encouraging results! The educational poster campaign has had some success in improving the quality of the recyclables collected from metropolitan Melbourne train stations.