Out and About

Family context:

My family doesn't usually go on extravagant weekend trips, but if we do it's usually for a dance competition. On these weekends we stay in hotel rooms and eat out which can produce more waste than needed. While this weekend was for a fun trip with another family I challenged my family to keep in mind their consumption.

What actually happened:

I'll start first by talking about the New York City trip. The hotel we stayed at had no place in the rooms to recycle and we had plenty of water bottles to recycle. They did give up reusable water bottles as gifts which we used when we could. When we went out to eat no one had left overs which help eliminate containers. In the end I think we did pretty well with our waste management.

Now in the daily and local sense, we used reusable bags and asked for paper ones when we didn't have the reusable ones. We don't eat fast food normally so that wasn't an issue and the weekly-ish pizza we get we burned the box since you can't recycle them. I also stopped getting gas receipts and my mom did the same since most aren't printed on recyclable paper.

Overall I think my family did well trying to be wasteless when their out because it's hard when you're in an area, like New York City, and their aren't better options around. We were not able to try the trench composting since we don't camp in the winter, but I'm excited to try it the next time I'm out camping or hiking.

data analysis:

This week also happen to include Christmas and we were still at two garbage bags a week. All of the preparation in the previous weeks helped to eliminate waste during the holiday. There was a spike in plastic containers but that was because my dad was home on vacation from work and had a yogurt every morning. The same goes for food wrappers and food scraps because our school vacation also started this week.