Blog 4: Keep Your Trash

Discussion time/date/location: Sept 14th, 2022 6pm-6:32 via Zoom!

Participants: ALL: Kalan Dixon, Cj Dierking, Gigi Descalzi

This week, like my peers, didn’t have as much trash as I expected, I think this is because this week was very busy for me and I haven’t been home a lot. However, I did take notice that I had a lot of single-use snacks and food packages. Things like pringles can, fruit snack wrappers, and mini ice creams, haha. From our group discussion we found out that both I and Gigi had a cold, so we both had a lot of tissues, and I had a few Dayquil wrappers. I was also doing a garbage collection exercise in one of my other courses and one thing we talked about was that paper products take up the most mass in landfills today. Not plastic, not dirty, diapers (which is surprisingly a higher percentage as well), but all paper products. It really surprised me the number of paper products (paper towels, toilet paper, etc) I had in my trash. If I had to choose one thing to reduce my consumption, I would try my best to reduce my paper product intake! Overall, as a group, we came to the conclusion that single-use items, especially in our case snack items, aren't really good long-term and they pile up fairly easily! Also keeping our trash this week really made us think about trash output as a whole and put our footprints into perspective!