On January 6th, 2023, Alan introduced us to a project that involves trash, like, much trash. We were asked to save the solid trash we produced for a week. Of course, not food waste or unhygienic waste. At the end of the week, we will separate them into categories like plastics, paper, cardboard, aluminum, glass, mixed metals, and others. After separating them, we will weigh each category of trash in grams. Then the mass of each type will be multiplied by 52 to estimate the mass per year for each category. We call this project PSWI or Personal Solid Waste Inventory. Here is the waste I produced in a week. (A lot)

Why PSWL?

The Personal Solid Waste Inventory (PSWI) project aims to determine how much solid waste we create and dispose of in a week and estimate the average solid waste we contribute in a year to become more aware of our overall resource use. Here are the data for the project

I asked my guardian in the US about what trash they produced the most. They said it is paper and cardboard. Because my guardian's family is from China, and we have a tradition in China to boil water to drink, we rarely buy bottled water. Also, my guardian said that because most of the time they cook for themselves and do not order takeout, little plastic is also created. Cardboard and paper are the top two waste produced because his family loves to buy stuff online. And they usually get delivered in a cardboard box. Everyone must use paper all the time to blow their nose and wipe something down. The only reason our class does not have abundant paper is that we did not collect some of the paper waste because we consider it unhygienic. As my guardian said, " I don't know where all the tissue went, I put a box out at the conter and it's gone the next day."(Simon Jiu)

Reflections:

I do not think I consciously altered my choices to generate waste during those seven days. However, I did subconsciously stay away from making unnecessary waste. Moreover, the trash I collected in the bag needed to be more accurate since I did not bring the trash bag with me everywhere I went. Because of that, I could have changed my results by only collecting my trash whenever I remembered, which could have been more practical and accurate.

An aspect that makes this project memorable to me is that we are collecting our trash. We are not used to doing that; before, I just threw it out whenever I produced solid waste. Like this process of producing waste and throwing it out is subconscious, we do not think about it that much; we have trash and throw it out. However, it was not until this project that I realized how much trash I was producing daily and over a year.

There are not many things I will change from this project, but keeping all the trash in my room and trying not to throw things away is really painful.

(All photos created by Zack Cong unless otherwise stated.)