48 Hour Journal

I definitely think the amount of waste I made was far less than what a lot of people make.  I have noticed that when I’m alone in my apartment, I only take out the trash maybe once a week, if that.  When my roommate is here, we’re taking it out at least every two days, sometimes every single day.  She constantly drinks from plastic bottles, doesn’t recycle anything, throws out a bunch of food even if it’s still perfectly good, and eats mostly packaged things for dinner or gets takeout.  I’m the exact opposite of this.  I like to cook lots of veggies that I get from the farmer’s market, and I’ll save food for up to a week.  When she runs out of plastic bottles, she tries to get me to alternate buying the cases with her.  Considering I never drink out of plastic bottles, I never end up buying them.  It genuinely upsets me to see how much she wastes since she buys it all herself.  I always tell her to save her leftovers, but she normally ends up tossing them.  I’d offer to eat them for her (my stomach is a literal bottomless pit) but she eats meat and dairy, and I don’t.  I don’t want to judge her based on what she does with her hard earned money, the food she cooks, or what she puts into her body, but it’s not the lifestyle I’ve picked for myself.  Thankfully, my parents help me out with buying my food, but I still don’t like to spend that much on it because I know they have their own expenses to pay for, as well. 

With all of that being said, I do think I could get a little bit better with the amount of waste I make.  Finishing bottles of wine and throwing out coffee filters is inevitable, but I do reuse my wine bottles and make facial scrubs out of my leftover coffee grounds.  I’ve been trying really hard to be a lot more conscious of the waste I make, and whatever waste I do make, I try to make it recyclable. 

One thing I definitely need to get better with is eating out.  When I’m at class on Mondays and Wednesdays, I normally go out for lunch just because it’s more convenient.  This normally means eating a salad in a plastic package or a sandwich in aluminum foil, both of which get put into a paper or plastic bag and are consumed with plastic forks.  I need to start budgeting my time to meal prep throughout the week so I have food to bring with me to school, so I don’t need to buy food constantly.  This will also save on my weekly costs!

When I think of wasting things, I think of clothing manufacturers wasting scrap textile and dumping buttons into bodies of water.  If factories began sending their scrap fabric to textile repurposing companies such as FabScrap, there would be such an insane decrease in the amount of textile waste on the planet.