Trash Inventory

I never really thought about how much I throw away, and not just paper. Tossing an empty container or a bit of tinfoil is something that happens out of habit and ignorant bliss. As part of an ongoing effort to make my lifestyle more sustainable, recognizing exactly what I use up was the first step, and toward that end I recorded everything I threw away for an entire week.

I wasn’t sure what to expect. Would I turn out to be like the average American, throwing away 4.6 lbs of garbage a day[1]? Would my habit of getting food to go push me over that amount, or would my bare bones college lifestyle land me below average?

This is what I ended up throwing away last week:

While I was recording my garbage amount, I felt like I wasn’t writing very much down, but when I tallied it at the end of the week, I realized that even a little bit each day adds up. While I am well below the average of 4.6 pounds a day (I probably had less than 4.6 pounds for the whole week, and much of it was recycled), over time my garbage will add up and add significantly to landfills.

The issue of only seeing our impacts in small doses leads to the mindset that it doesn’t much matter what we do because we are such a small part of the world. I didn’t think I was producing that much trash when I only saw the amount for each day, but when I added it up at the end of the week, I realized that it was quite a lot. Many people don’t think about how all the miles they drive and all the plastic they consume and throw away adds up to full landfills and global warming because each individual decision they make, such as whether to ride the bus a couple miles to the mall or to take a car, doesn’t make much of an impact. It’s the aggregate of all of those decisions that determines one’s effect on the environment, and many people fail to think about that.

Most of the garbage I produced had to do with the transportation of food, such as cups, wrappers, and containers. It is easy to get a bagel in a bag with a small container of cream cheese and disposable knife, and when one lives in the dorms, it is the only way to get food to eat later. Since I am not allowed to take food out the dining halls and I do not have space to store food in my room, I am forced to use the take out options if I want to eat anywhere but in the dining halls. On occasion, the option is available to bring your own supplies, like your own cup to get coffee. However, as soon as I realized that bringing my own cup would mean carrying it around all day, as I go straight from breakfast to class, and washing it everyday in the common bathrooms, I went back to getting paper cups and throwing them away.

We toss these resources because we are forced to make the decision between having more time in the present and having a trash filled planet in the future, and humans really blow at planning ahead. What is one more coffee cup in the landfill if it means we don’t have to do as much work now? The immediate benefits of disposables appear to outweigh seemingly miniscule long-term consequences, but those small consequences add up and create big problems.

[1] Annenberg Foundation. Garbage. Retrieved from http://www.learner.org/interactives/garbage/intro.html