Earth Day: Part 2

Earth day was last week? Well, not where I work. Earth day got moved on accounta the weather. So let's check in with some more of our trash bag guinea pigs.

Joy says, "
The contents of my bag at the end of the day.
1. Paper towels

2. Food waste: green and red pepper cores and seeds, garlic and onion skin, piece of lettuce

3. plastic bag and saran wrap

4. Two seals from seasoning

5. An obligatory Reese's package...just for kicks!"

Most of this stuff, except for the plastic, is compostable!

Kerry had some interesting problems with her trash.

"I missed the part about sending a PICTURE of my trash from those 24 hours. Luckily, I saved the trash. Here it is.

In this picture (that she did not send), you will find one piece of dental floss, 3 napkins, one kleenex, one plastic bag (which I now realize I should recycle), and one plastic salad dressing container (which I also may be able to recycle). I am missing one girl thing (which I was not about to carry around), one napkin (which I accidentally threw out), and one straw that was taken away from me by Dave. Everything else was recycled, flushed (as we discussed), or reused. I'm a good girl."

Those feminine hygiene products are another matter entirely. However, if you're going to suggest that I use one of those cup things you can save your breath. As Vegan Meatloaf says, "I would do anything for trees but I won't do that."

Giving us a man's perspective is Justin:

"For the Earth Day challenge I carried my trash around in a Dollar General bag. Taking a look inside now that the day is over I see that I did not generate much garbage on Thursday. A couple of cups, some scraps of paper and napkins, a bit of plastic, and an Arbys sandwich wrapper. I also recycled 2 cans from yesterday. Overall, with my lack of money until payday it seems I was unable to generate my quota of 4 pounds of garbage."

Four pounds of garbage per person is a lot of pounds of garbage! I have a hard time visualizing what that would look like. Chelsea weighs 4 lbs....so it'd be about this much of garbage.

Barney- My Bag of Trash

I haven't taken a picture yet of Barney, because the day is not over, but I wanted to make sure to get this post up tonight.

I was pleasantly surprised to bump into other people doing this with me. Students in my classes proudly brandished their bags at me. One student waved it like a flag at me from across the quad. I received reports of students asking other faculty, "Where's your bag?"

Still more interesting were the questions about the "rules" and the people who didn't think they could attempt it but thought about trash all day anyway.
Do tissues go into the bag? Yes.
Does used toilet paper? I say, "No." because you wouldn't put it in the trash anyway. But...I admit that I did think about where all of it goes today...and how much of it there must be.
Do my kids diapers go in there? Technically, yes....but ummm...no. Just like, think about it or something.

I'm really pleased that people who didn't actually do it still thought about their trash throughout the day. That's kind of the point. And while carrying around the bag all day was kind of annoying and even sometimes embarrassing it was also a good Earth Day conversation piece. But I admit I'd be hesitant to do this on a non-Earth Day. On Earth Day it seems vaguely political...the other 364? Ummm...you might be a weirdo. I got some interesting looks in the grocery store.

I've received a few reports from other folks who took the challenge.

Janel says, "I don't know if you meant the end of the business day or the actual end of the day, but at this point I have in my bag the following:
a few Q-tips
paper towel
packaging for individual servings of apple sauce
packaging for Pillsbury cinnonmon rolls
(two) granola bar wrappers
a bottle top, and
a plastic sandwich bag

I'd love to know if I could recycle any of that. :)"

I told her that the applesauce containers could be recycled if she was willing to go through some rigmarole, the Q-tips and paper towels could be composted and the sandwich bag could be washed and reused.

Nancy wrote, "Besides the banana peel and apple core and some stems of grape vines which were not composted, there was a plastic wrapper from a popsicle (the stick was recycled) and two napkins from lunch and dinner in my bag. I might be disqualified by the fact that I did not take the bag with me on my walking today, but I thought I'd enter to be a part of the earth day initiative."

Babysitting the bag was kind of a chore. It was easy to remember it at work because I kept it with my keys but once I got home it was hard to drag it around. When we walked around the neighborhood with it I felt self conscious at first but then I kind of forgot about it.

Cherylann did really well. According to her, her bag had, "Air, nothing but air. I only used reusable containers today, and recycled my drink cans/bottles and my school papers I didn't need anymore. LOL, I was really conscious about what I used today. But sad to say, I'm not that conscious every day. Today is the first day (I think EVER) that I didn't take a bag of trash out to the dumpster, either. " This makes me wonder what her bag would have been like if we did make her count the dirty diapers!

Personally I am surprised, not by the amount of trash that I made, but by some of the items in it.

My bag contains (so far):
1 yogurt cup (I could recycle this by washing it and taking it to a collection site since the curbside recycling won't take it....but I never do this so it goes in the bag.)
1 eye make up removing pad (compostable? dunno what it's made out of)
4 fruit/veg stickers
A million paper towels from work (compostable...in theory)
1 Hansens drink mix packet
1 cream cheese foil
1 plastic fork

I referred to this bag throughout the day as my bag of shame since it contains many things that I could deal with properly but I don't. I could wash and reuse that fork but I won't. I could collect all of my paper towels from my day at work, bring them home, and put them in the compost but I probably never will. I could collect a stack of yogurt cups and bring them to the museum but the best I've ever done is to reuse them for starting seeds. One of my co-workers told me she just puts the yogurt cups in the curbside recycling even though she knows they won't take them.

The thing that struck me about doing this was the way I felt about it. The first time I used the bathroom at work I came out, washed my hands and thought, "Darn it. This goes in the bag." It had NEVER occurred to me on previous bathroom visits that I'd ever do anything but put that towel right in the trash. At home I compost paper towels as long as they don't have anything really grody on them but I'd seriously never even thought about that for an instant at work.

Another dilemma came when my new shipment of glasses came in. Blake ordered them as a gift for me, half of the glasses were his but I opened the package. Does this go in my bag or his? I asked Gavin and he said, "I'll settle this. It goes in my bag!" and promptly threw it in the trash.

The cream cheese wrapper was for dessert for everyone's dinner, half of the cream cheese was gone and I hadn't used any of it. As the last person to use it was the disposal my burden? I put it in the bag.

I eat vegetables and fruit all day every day. I also make most of my own food at home from scratch. Tomato sauce, dried beans and hummus are staples in our diet that I make to avoid the salt and sugar associated with the prepackaged counter part. I've been getting weirder about this in the last few years. Now I'm washing my produce in homemade produce wash. I bring this up because without my recycling and compost bins at home I'd create a lot more garbage. We sometimes generate two mixing bowls filled with food scraps and peelings in one day. It's nice to not have to dump it in the trash and in the summer when my garden is in full swing it's fun to get creative with the kitchen castoffs. Plastic is unavoidable though. Plastic produce bags, plastic stickers, plastic bean bags and other doo dads must be stripped off of all of the produce before it can be used.

As I get more feedback about this experiment I'll try to post it. I'm really interested to find out how everyone's day went and I am completely floored to think about all of the people who collected their trash for more than a week!

Talkin' Trash

We make a lot of trash every day. About 4 pounds of trash per person every day. But that's the average person, right? You're not the average person! You care about the environment.

In honor of Earth Day I have a challenge for you.

When you wake up on April 22 get a bag out of your paper or plastic bag collection (we all have one) and for the rest of the day anything you would normally throw in the trash, take it with you. Put it in your bag. Then, at the end of the day, send me a picture or a description of your collection. Everyone who sends something will be entered in a drawing to win a $25 Locopops gift card if you're local or some other "green" business if you're not near a Locopops.

Here are the rules:
-If you can compost it compost it! It doesn't need to go in the bag.
- If you can recycle it recycle it! It doesn't need to go in the bag.
- If you don't have a compost bin or aren't going to recycle it THAT DAY it goes in the bag.
- Your bag must be with you at all times. You can't leave it in your office while you're teaching. You can't leave it in the car while you're in class. You can't put it in a locker if you go to the gym. This trash is your trash and it must be within 5 feet of you at all times.

I didn't come up with this idea on my own. This project has been done with people collecting trash and carrying it around for a week, two weeks or a month. I'm only asking you to collect it for a day.

I will post the results on letsblogaboutyou.com on Friday.






Some facts about trash from the Clean Air Council:
Waste Production

• In the U.S., 4.39 pounds of trash per day and up to 56 tons of trash per year are created by the average person.
  
• Only about one-tenth of all solid garbage in the United States gets recycled.
  
• Every year we fill enough garbage trucks to form a line that would stretch from the earth, halfway to the moon.
  
• Each day the United States throws away enough trash to fill 63,000 garbage trucks.
  
• Almost 1/3 of the waste generated the U.S. is packaging.
  
• Diapers: An average child will use between 8,000 -10,000 disposable diapers ($2,000 worth) before being potty trained. Each year, parents and babysitters dispose of about 18 billion of these items. In the United States alone these single-use items consume nearly 100,000 tons of plastic and 800,000 tons of tree pulp. We will pay an average of $350 million annually to deal with their disposal and, to top it off, these diapers will still be in the landfill 300 years from now. Americans throw away 570 diapers per second. That's 49 million diapers per day.
  
• Americans throw away 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour.
  
• Every year, Americans make enough plastic film to shrink-wrap the state of Texas.
  
• The amount of glass bottles Americans throw away every two weeks would have filled both World Trade Center towers.
  
• Americans throw away enough aluminum cans to rebuild our commercial air fleet every three months, and enough iron and steel to supply all our nation's automakers every day.
  
• Throwing away one aluminum can wastes as much energy as if that can were 1/2 full of gasoline.
  
• In the U.S., an additional 5 million tons of waste is generated during the holidays. Four million tons of this is wrapping paper and shopping bags.
  
• Americans receive almost 4 million tons of junk mail every year. Most of it winds up in landfills.
  
• The average American uses 650 pounds of paper a year.
  
• Each year, Americans trash enough office paper to build a 12-foot wall from Los Angeles to New York City.
  
• Americans toss out enough paper & plastic cups, forks and spoons every year to circle the equator 300 times.
  
• The average American office worker goes through around 500 disposable cups every year.
  
• Nearly 44 million American workers purchase or eat lunch out every weekday.
  
• Americans make nearly 400 billion photocopies a year - about 750,000 copies every minute of every day.
  
• U.S. fax machines sent 30 billion faxes in 1990.
  
• U.S. businesses now use about 21 million tons of paper every year. That's about 175 pounds of paper for each American.
  
• Enough hazardous waste is generated in one year to fill the New Orleans Superdome 1,500 times over.
  
• New York City alone throws out enough garbage each day to fill the Empire State Building.
  
• In one day, Americans get rid of 20,000 cars and 4,000 trucks and buses.
  
• As of 1992, 14 billion pounds of trash were dumped into ocean annually around the world.
  
• Forty-three thousand tons of food is thrown out in the United States each day.
  
• Americans throw out about 270 million tires every year.
  
• Sixty-five billion aluminum soda cans are used each year.
  

Landfills

• Only two manmade structures on Earth are large enough to be seen from outer space: the Great Wall of China and the Fresh Kills landfill!
  
• Barges (which run 24 hours a day) deliver over 14,000 tons of New York City trash to Fresh Kills every day. (Notes: The Fresh Kills Landfills is closing soon and is only being kept open to receive debris from the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center Towers).
  
• In 1979, there were an estimated 18,500 landfills in the nation. In 1990 there were only about 6,300, and by 1995 it was estimated that only about 3,000 would still be open. In just 16 years the number of landfills dropped by 84%. During that same time there was an 80% increase in the amount of trash generated.
  
• Seventy percent of U.S. municipal solid waste gets buried in landfills.
  
• U.S. landfills are closing at the rate of 1 per day.
  

Incinerators

• 108,234 tons of waste per day is incinerated.
  

Waste and Natural Resource Use

• Every year, nearly 900,000,000 trees are cut down to provide raw materials for American paper and pulp mills.
  
• Each American exerts three times as much pressure on the natural environment as the global average.
  
• The average American, in one lifetime, uses: 18 tons of paper, 23 tons of wood, 16 tons of metal, and 32 tons of organic chemicals.
  
• America is home to 5% of the world's population, yet it consumes 1/3 of the Earth's timber and paper; making paper the largest part of the waste stream at 37.5% of the total waste stream.
  
• Every 4 quarts of oil discarded during an average oil change can contaminate 1 million gallons of water.
  
• People who change their own oil improperly dump the equivalent of 16 Exxon Valdez spills into the nation's sewers and landfills every year.
  

Recycling Works!

• 1,500 aluminum cans are recycled every second in the U.S.
  
• Recycling an aluminum soda can saves 96% of the energy used to make a can from ore, and produces 95% less air pollution and 97% less water pollution.
  
• It takes the energy equivalent of half a soda can of gasoline to produce one soda can from bauxite ore.
  
• In 1986, 48.7% of all aluminum cans were being recycled. In 1990, that percentage increased to 63.6% and, in 1996, 63.5% were being recycled.
  
• The amount of paper recycled annually by the average American in 1995 was 301.8 lbs., increasing in 1996 to 329 lbs.
  
• Recycling one ton of cardboard saves over 9 cubic yards of landfill space.
  
• One ton of paper from recycled pulp saves 17 trees, 3 cubic yards of landfill space, 7,000 gallons of water, 4,200 kilowatt hours (enough to heat your home for half year), 390 gallons of oil, and prevents 60 pounds of air pollutants.
  
• Producing recycled white paper creates 74% less air pollutants, 35% less water pollutants, and 75% less process energy than producing paper from virgin fibers.
  
• Sixty percent of the world's lead supply comes from recycled batteries.
  
• It takes 90% less energy to recycle an aluminum can than to make a new one.