Friday, November 7, 2008

Trash Talk

I came across a funny blog a couple of weeks ago, written by a guy who calls himself Sustainable Dave (I think he has another blog under that name). It's called 365 Days of Trash, and he decided last year to not throw anything away for one year. This doesn't mean that he has no trash, but he's been recording all of his trash (both recycling and garbage), weighing it, and keeping it in his basement. I'm not sure what the benefit to keeping it in the basement is, except for perhaps the visual reminder of the garbage that we all create. He's been able to seriously reduce the amount of garbage he produces (I imagine that even before this experiment it was much less than the average American) and seems to have a tolerant wife who puts up with the whole thing.

There's also a Time article about him that explains the background of the whole project. Much of the blog consists of lists of his daily garbage (when I compare them to my own list of throwaways, I am stunned) but he also jots down his thoughts about how the project is progressing. It's a really interesting look at what we leave behind, in a very visual manner. He talks about how when we say that we threw something away, nobody ever stops to think about where away is. A thought-provoking (and definitely unusual) read.

1 comment:

Bezzie said...

Oh I think about away...I'm just grateful to finally live in a place where they actually recycle. But it saddens me how many people don't recycle..or they just recycle their newspapers. There's so much other paper crap one can recycle--cartons, junk mail, school papers, etc. And all they put out there is two weeks worth of papers??