This one week journey through recording my waste shed a lot of light on my perception of trash and my waste habits. The thing is, we really don’t realize how much we throw out until we are forced to record them and take a good look for ourselves. Looking at my record of trash after one week, I would say I’m actually impressed by how little trash I had down for one whole week. I honestly thought I would have had more, especially since I recorded ever little nitty gritty detail of my trash including pencil shavings. I know there is definitely room for improvement in minimizing the amount of trash I produce, so I think continuing to keep a record of my waste will do just that.
The category in which I produced the most waste was from making/creating, which made sense because I was starting my first week at college, so I was using and disposing a lot of materials. The category of materials, in which I found most of my waste was being generated from was between paper and plastic. For this week, according to my spreadsheet, plastic actually wins.
The past week showed me that even though I’m starting to move towards better waste habits, there is definitely room for improvement. One solution that can actually help me to diminish my personal waste would be to really commit to using reusable water bottles for at least 5 days a week. I’ve been really bad about packing my reusable water bottle to school for various reasons; the main one being that it’s so heavy. However, my goal for this semester (and basically from now on) is to always use my reusable water bottle and to give up plastic water bottles. And quite honestly if you cut down all the plastic water bottles from my spreadsheet, the number of items on my list would go down significantly. In general, I’m going to be more conscious about what I use and throw out, specifically to reduce my use of paper and plastic throughout my daily life.
Below are two pieces I drew of just some of the trash that I had recorded throughout my one week trash record. I used white charcoal against black paper to show the contrast and detail of each piece of trash. Why I chose to do this was to demonstrate the contrast between the beauty of the drawing and the actual harm that these objects can really do to our environment if not properly recycled.
Link to my spreadsheet of one week’s trash: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BfWVYSzILcj471ZKz8s3yNjn2f3RFH015iciFtAnguM/edit?usp=sharing
