I have this tiny little garbage shoot in my apartment building. My roommate and I always just collect the trash till the bin is full, tie the little red (plastic) tie on the (plastic) garbage bag, and throw it into the little hole in the way. No one really cares for what happens to it after that. No one really pays attention to where it goes because it would just be too much effort.

This plastics audit was interesting to me because not only, did it allowed me to get a sense of tracking something I am doing subconsciously, but also, gave me an idea of how citizen data is collected. I really thought it was cool to compare all of our different numbers as individuals to the class and as our class to last year’s class. Because I live in a tiny Brooklyn apartment, with one other student, there isn’t really much going on in the sense of plastic consumption. We always use glass plates and cups that we can reuse. We don’t often order food that come in plastic take out containers. We don’t eat small individually wrapped junk. So even though I had a full week to collect the data, my numbers were small relative to the people who lived at home with their large families.

This plastics audit made me think about how dependent society is on plastic. I went grocery shopping during this week and just about everything was nicely wrapped in shiny individual plastic wrappers or bags. If we have generated all of this waste as a society up until this date, we are capable of so much more plastic trash. Without a change in our plastic consumption habits, we might as well kiss the wellbeing of our earth goodbye!

Another thing that this project made me think of is the data sense. Interpreting graphs, finding relationships and trends, understanding and analyzing data, making order of magnitude estimates, and understanding data collection were all touched upon in this audit. This project was successful overall, and I really thought it was important to get a sense of how much my trash has an impact on the world around me.

PS: I thought this article was great!