I am in an extremely tight living situation this quarter and so to accumulate garbage even for a week sounded absoutely awful. I immediately sought out ways to separate the decomposing trash [food scraps/“bean juice” for example] by stashing the pieces inside of other trash containers [for example, I used a tortilla chip bag and a clothespin to stash five banana peels, my eleven-times- recycled paper towel [I recommend Brawny], tea cans and coffee grounds among pieces of gum and other unsavory things. I quickly became aware of how much trash is the byproduct of sheer laziness on my part. Do I really need to use the plastic forks from trader joe’s? Do I even need to buy those granola bars if they come inside a cardboard box AND are individually wrapped in plastic?
I started to store the trash in my dresser-drawer, unable to take the direct smell of decaying Subway sandwich juice. It was then [day three] that I stopped buying food altogether, especially in packages of any form, and switch to eating apples and carrots [not the baby carrot kind, the whole kind.] I ate the core, too, and focused my efforts on producing less food waste, buying no more than I could finish and buying my vegetables every other day instead of once [previously.] The bagged-kale I’d purchased a week before had gone bad, so I had to stuff the whole thing inside of the tortilla-chip bag. It felt like an act of redemption – I am actually going to use this new consciousness to minimize my food waste from now on by buying less food, on a more frequent basis.
I also realized how many times I could re-use tinfoil and disposable food containers; for lunch, I prepared food and stored it in my disposable baking pan, and re-used the foil covering four times. I would have stockpiled four times that amount had I not been actively trying to minimize the amount of trash I was producing. On the 6th day, the rotting smell was pretty unbearable, even through the drawer; I caved, threw away my trash [it all fit inside one costco-sized garbage bag], and bought myself a cheap stack of tupperware, which I’m ashamed to admit I’d never really thought about doing before this project.
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