48 Hour Journal by Jacqueline Senecal

I was extremely surprised with how much waste I make in the span of 48 hours. It seems that I expected to go into the assignment with small amounts of waste for one person because when you don’t think about it. A lot of my garbage was recycled, like coffee cups, yogurt containers, and plastic bags. I didn’t even category my energy usage, which I’m sure has created even more waste for the environment. The amount of energy can be measured somehow, but it’s so hard to be able to measure for each person, which creates another problem for energy usage and saving energy. However, I don’t know where my plastic goes after it’s recycled. I think if someone were to go and track their daily imprint it would be a lot more than they originally considered. My imprint is smaller than most because most of my garbage can be recycled or composted, but the number of things that had to be thrown out still contribute to landfill, no matter how small. This was also only in a 2-day span, so my contribution to landfill is almost 150 times this amount, which is crazy for just one person. This just shows how whole industries create so much waste and since they don’t track any of it, probably don’t believe they create as much overproduction and excess as they do. This all ends up in landfills and stays there for years since it won’t disintegrate or biodegrade at all. Especially in fashion, which is the second most polluting industry in the world, there’s so much waste that’s created. The problem with fashion is that it’s not changing in its energy wasting ways. They still use plastic bags to wrap every garment, use unrecycled hang tags, package all the garments in unrecycled plastic, and that’s only for shipping the garment. The process of making clothes also takes chemicals, natural resources, pollutants, and a lot of water waste. This is creating more and more waste every day, on top of what normal everyday people create, and what other polluting industries are harming the earth with. In the lesson with Dr. Chandu, he said that we need to take carbon emissions out of the earth to be able to prevent and reverse climate change. These polluting industries need to take account for what they have done to the planet and de-carbonize it to save the environment. In the future, companies, businesses, and every day individuals need to find ways to de-carbonate the planet. Whether this be turning fossil fuel energy into renewable energy such as wind and solar energies, this could be done by the polluting industries. Our future depends on how we act today, and this journal shows the ways that we harm the planet every day. That’s why in the future more companies need to figure out new ways to reduce this waste, especially in the fashion industry. A couple ways to do this would be using less packaging, using recycled packaging, finding ways that their garment production uses less water, natural resources, and more recycled materials instead of producing new. I believe that if the entire industry works together, this can be achieved.