It took a lot of effort to remember to keep all of the waste that I produced. Often times, out of habit, i would accidentally throw away/recycle a piece of paper or small piece of garbage. After a few days I grew better at always having my own trash receptacle that i kept on me in my bag or backpack. Keeping this on me was a great way to think about all of my waste throughout my day.
I found my biggest areas of waste stemmed from where I got my food from. I had to go grocery shopping and while picking out items i was thinking about how much packaging it had. I love Trader Joes to death, but I now realize it will lead to all of our deaths. Some of their products, specifically their produce, have an incredible amount of excess packaging.
In the middle of last week I went to LA for a concert. Since I only went for the day I did little in preparation. This meant a lot of my day was spent consuming food and other products that generated waste. When eating out it forced me to think about not just the waste that I obtained in the transaction, but all that goes on in the kitchen to prepare the food.
This weekend I was in Sequoia National Park. Because of my trip to LA and the necessity of bringing my own food on this trip, I was very cognizant in preparing my food for the trip. When I didn’t eat out I felt that I had much more control over the amount of waste I created.
Finally, on Sunday when it was time to go through the trash, me and my house did a big clean. In the past months we have had a mice problem and lots of out cabinets and drawers got infected with mice poop. This meant almost all of our kitchen supplies needed to be thrown away. After solving the problem and ridding our house of the mice, it was time to clean up the poop. When bleaching everything in our house, we used so many paper towels. Some of these paper towels with the poop were mistakingly thrown into my personal trash bag, therefore, I did not sort through my trash because it was now infected.
Heres a picture that one of my roommates took of me holding my poopy trash:
- Tyler Hentges
