So you’ve heard of “What I Eat in a Days” and “What I’m Wearing Today”… but have you ever heard of “What I waste in a Week?”. Keep reading (or watch with the video below) to see how much I throw out in an average week as a low-waste gal.
As some of you may know, I’m studying Environmental Studies in University. Two semester ago, I had the opportunity to take a class called “Global History of Waste”. In this class, we talked a lot about the sociological understanding of waste through history.
The first week of class we did this really awesome exercise where we were supposed to track everything that we threw away (sans sanitary products) for a week. The professor gave us trash bags that we were instructed to store all our trash we produced in a week. Truthfully, I didn’t stay dedicated to the assignment (nor did many of my classmates, from what I heard). BUT, now a year later, when I’m much more entrenched in a low-waste lifestyle, I felt inspired to do the same.
For a week, I collected everything I threw in the trash in a lovely brown bag (shoutout Kroger). This doesn’t include what I recycled or composted, but I definitely aspire to make a video with that in the future.
I struggle with eco-anxiety and a lot of guilt surrounding my individual environmental footprint. Although I thought this exercise might exacerbate that guilt, I was pleased to realize that it actually helped me. Through this exercise, I realized that I’m doing a pretty dang good job minimizing my waste and being as intentional with what I use as possible.
I hope that I can inspire you to track your waste and use it as encouragement to pursue a low(er) waste lifestyle. Finally, I hope I can impart the idea onto you that you do not need to be perfect to make progress. It is nearly impossible to reduce your environmental footprint to zero, and you don’t need to. Make the personal changes that you can and continue to advocate for systemic change.
