
All my trash for a year fit into two plastic bags - sonabinu
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/29/all-my-trash-for-a-year-fit-into-two-plastic-bags-heres-how-i-did-it/?tid=hp__
======
jacobolus
Does anyone know of any good systematic studies of the waste / environmental
costs of various activities, purchases, etc.?

I suspect that e.g. living in a smaller house or apartment, driving less and
driving a smaller vehicle (more generally, living in an urban area with less
pavement and other infrastructure per capita compared to suburbs), better
insulating buildings (or constructing them with other passive heating/cooling)
and scaling back the temperature control, using less hot water or heating it
less, reducing water use on yards/landscaping, reducing use of energy-
intensive gadgets (e.g. drying clothes on a line, using a smaller television),
consuming less meat and dairy, buying local vegetables in season instead of
shipped thousands of miles, and otherwise eating more canned food and
recycling the cans, taking local vacations vs. traveling internationally, etc.
might have more effect than explicitly trying to optimize only for quantity of
personal trash generated.

One problem with our current economy is that our prices do a terrible job at
signaling true costs, and the whole system is so complex that any individual
person has almost no chance at guessing correctly, if trying to organize their
life to reduce external impact. (So much of the price we pay is distorted by
some clever company arbitraging international tax differences, cheating
regulatory controls, defrauding poor countries and bribing their officials to
cover it up, or dumping unlimited toxic shit in places without any oversight.)

It’s like trying to optimize code without a profiler.

As one small example, I’d love to see some kind of systemic analysis of the
comparative environmental costs of ordering something online and having it
delivered in a truck from a warehouse wrapped in cardboard and then recycling
the cardboard vs. driving a single person in a large car to and from a store
10 miles away, including the land and energy costs of keeping inventory in the
local stores, employing the cashiers, etc. Personally I little idea what the
total impacts are of these two choices.

~~~
Scoundreller
Directly, or indirectly, I'd say that the price of a product does a good job
of the value of resources expended in getting it to you. This includes: The
cost/time of the marketers of the product, the cost/time of its production,
the cost/time of whatever services are paid for through taxes on that product,
etc. I just wish taxes did a better job of taxing relatively irreversible
destruction (like oxidizing 100m old C-C and C-H bonds).

If you spend less money, you burn up fewer things in the process, which I
think your examples exhibit quite well. Though I'd suggest that
flying/trucking food thousands of kilometers means expending less energy than
preserving it or risking spoilage. The food may be fresher to boot too.

~~~
Retric
I don't think that's a great model as a brentling watch and a Honda civic
hardly took the same resources to produce. A new 900sf condo in DC takes few
resources compared to a new 20,000 sf house in West Virginia even if there
both 500k.

~~~
Scoundreller
So what happens with the $15k that gets spent on the watch or the $X00k on the
condo? The sellers aren't burying the resources in the ground, they're
spending it on other stuff, like jet vacations, a low mpg vehicle, a big home
in the country, etc.

~~~
Retric
That gets into the fixed pie fallicy, if I buy your house and you buy my house
we can have an economic transaction where both sides benifit and no resources
are lost.

In the watch example it's possible to pay with cash and have the money
distroyed after the fact etc. As such taking about potential future resources
to be spent is irrelevant when taking about the resources consumed to create
something.

------
oberstein
> Five months into the experiment, after some initial reservations, I gave up
> toilet paper. Now I do things the way hundreds of millions (including my
> extended family) in India do — with water and my left hand.

That's pretty gross. What's the delta for the energy cost of doing that, its
use of extra water and extra heat and extra soap for the water to clean his
hand, with the energy cost of a few squares of toilet paper and less water and
heat and soap?

~~~
benten10
My first reaction was extreme anger at your first statement. Now that I have
cooled down a bit,

Would you ever consider rubbing yourself with paper a valid realistic
alternative to showering?

Then WHY are you more comfortable with merely rubbing the shit off you, at the
dirtiest part of your body (than cleaning it using water, and washing it, like
your wash the rest of your body).

Those that use hands at least have clean butts and clean hands (most do wash
hands now!) -- you, on the other hand can't be completely confident about one.

: )

~~~
qyv
I think the reasoning goes something like this: The anus should be assumed to
be an unclean portion of the body, with the exception of directly after
washing it with _soap_ and water, and should always be treated under that
assumption. By using paper in between the hand and anus when wiping you are
attempting to avoid cross contamination with the hands, which is a part of the
body that is understood to be much cleaner. Simply avoiding contact between
the two areas is the most direct route to maintain this distinction. Washing
your hands with _soap_ and water after wiping serves as a further action to
maintain the usefulness of the hands.

You will notice that I highlighted soap above, I do this because I believe it
is the key factor often missed in discussions like this. You can argue that
hand + water can make your anus appear cleaner than hand + paper, but without
soap it is at best marginally more sanitary for your anus, and significantly
less sanitary for your hand. There is a reason we clean our bodies with soap
and water, not just water.

~~~
thrownaway2424
The problem is that only institutional toilet paper -- the kind used in
hospitals and prisons -- actually maintains any kind of separation between
hand body. The kind that everybody actually uses just absorbs and distributes
fecal matter.

------
mikegioia
This is wonderful and I've been trying to drastically reduce my consumption
for about a year now. I cannot over-emphasize how difficult it is, and not
even from an implementation standpoint.

The problem isn't the person trying to consume less, it's _everyone else_.
Everywhere you go (in NYC) you get bombarded with packaging. Going to get a
cup of coffee involves a paper cup, a plastic lid, 5 napkins, and then they
throw it all in a brown paper bag. I've seen people buy a soda at the bodega
and with it comes napkins, a straw, both in a brown bag and then all of that
in a plastic bag! I watch in horror the person pull the can out, throw
everything else away, drink the can and then toss that out too.

I start to wonder how far removed we all are from the landfills and production
to be completely oblivious to this insane level of waste. The worst part about
it is that when you repeatedly say "no bag, thank you" you get looked down
upon like some loony toon who can't function in society correctly.

~~~
thrownaway2424
Coffee in a bag is the most hilarious thing in NYC. And the coffee is awful,
of course.

I decided to give up paper coffee cups a few years ago. Now if I'm in a hurry
I just order an espresso and drink it on the spot, or if I'm not I order a
drip coffee and spend a few minutes relaxing and drinking it.

Of course, NYC has a bad relationship with the environment. They love trash
there.

[http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-worlds-most-wasteful-
me...](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-worlds-most-wasteful-megacity)

~~~
dplgk
I wonder how many usernames are filling up the landfills?

------
Mz
Interesting article and kudos to him, but:

 _I made a few exceptions. I couldn’t always control other people’s behavior,
so junk mail wouldn’t count as my own recycling. I wasn’t going to be a boor
and instruct a dinner-party host on how to reduce his or her trash. And if
someone gave me a gift — a token offered from the heart — I accepted it. Also,
I was working on my aerospace engineering Ph.D. in an experimental combustion
lab, and my research required many single-use materials: Mylar, latex gloves,
ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene (milk carton material), optical
cleaning wipes and so on. If I wanted to conduct quality research and finish
my dissertation, I’d have to separate requirements inside the lab from my
habits outside it._

So, his junk mail, social life and job/education did not count. I wonder how
much those things account for the typical 1500 pounds annually and how much
trash he "produced" that way without counting it.

~~~
pavel_lishin
If we're counting anecdata, the amount of junk mail I receive could probably
fit into a shopping bag.

The amount of gifts + wrapping I get could probably fit into three, but I also
make it pretty clear that I don't really need material gifts.

My job is a fucking disaster, I drank at least twelve cans of carbonated water
today, and I currently have literally six at my desk, not all of which are
empty. I wish we had a soda fountain.

------
jqm
I live on a couple of acres and there is no trash collection. We have to take
all our trash into town.

I started composting a year or so ago. Not little barrels or bins or anything
like that. I wanted to the compost to get hot and be able to really bury green
kitchen wastes so animals didn't pull it out. So every few months I have been
buying a large (500-600 pound) bale of ruined moldy hay ($10 at a hay yard
near here). I cut the strings and fluff the hay up with a pitchfork. Then I
add a quart or so of fertilizer and wet it. Then I pile it into a cone and wet
it again. The cones are about 5 feet tall initially with maybe a 5-6 foot
diameter base. I keep my eyes open for any additional organic matter I can
add. All the weeds, leaves, grass clippings... I even added some tall weeds I
cut from the roadside this summer.

We bury anything compostable in the pile. All vegetable scraps, paper plates,
paper towels, cardboard egg cartons, paper towel and toilet paper rolls, I
even put in a couple of big (non-shiny) cardboard boxes that were completely
consumed. About twice a month I turn the pile over. As the pile starts
breaking down and shrinking to the point it doesn't really heat up anymore I
start another one. At the end I have a tiny little pile of compost maybe 2.5
feet cubed. It's amazing how much all that stuff breaks down. It's a lot of
work but the compost is really great for the lawn and gardens. I couldn't buy
something of similar quality. I estimate it's cut our trash by about 1/3 and
importantly it also keeps most organic matter out of the trash which makes it
less stinky (we don't eat much meat and the dogs help with the scraps from the
little we do). Composting is a lot of fun. It's like farming microbes.

------
fizx
I've recently considered doing this, not because I particularly care about
generating a moderate amount of trash, but rather because I think that this
would be an excellent mindfulness exercise!

------
trevyn
Based on the Kardashev scale of technological advancement
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale)),
I think we should be trying to use more energy and resources, not less.

~~~
vacri
I don't see how the author deciding to use plastic forks again is going to get
us a Dyson sphere.

~~~
jtriangle
Just to advocate the unpopular for a moment, it could be that a consuming more
means a need for more energy which eventually leads to needing new ways to
create energy.

So, consumption drives innovation to enable more consumption and so on.

