Mose
Bishop O’Dowd High School
Day 22, Level 2-My Waste
So…here’s my waste for the day…surprisingly little! :)
From left to right: 3 Kleenex tissues (I’m starting to get over my cold), plastic snack bag, waxed
paper sandwich bag, Reach floss, Newman’s Own raisin box, Nature’s Path Organic Apple Pie
Crunch granola bar wrapper
The impact: each little piece of trash that goes into the landfill, no matter how small, contributes
to carbon emissions in the air. The tissue, the wrapper, everything in this picture is contributing
to carbon emissions when they go into the landfills. By throwing this trash away, all the toxins
that are inside of them will leak into the landfill with the thousands, maybe millions, of other
toxins that are already there, making one big pool of toxins.
What goes to the…
Landfill: tissues (once you use them, they aren’t recyclable), plastic bag, granola bar wrapper,
floss
Recycling: raisin box (can also be composted, I’ll explain in a minute)
Adding a new category here:
Compost: Waxed paper sandwich bag, raisin box
In Northern California, or at least in Oakland, with our garbage services, we get a little green
kitchen pail that looks like this:
In it, you put food scraps and food-soiled paper, like napkins and take-out boxes. You can also
put waxed paper products in it. When it’s time for garbage/recycling/yard trimmings pickup, you
dump what’s in here into your yard-trimmings bin. All of that then goes to be composted yay!
This is the food waste we produce in just 1 day. Think about all the things that aren’t going to the
landfill!
So…things that can be repurposed, recycled, or reused: the snack bag, sandwich bag, raisin box,
and food wrapper (that can go to terracycle. They are a really cool website that takes items we
usually throw away, and makes them into things like bags, flower pots, speakers, and pencil
cases! http://www.terracycle.com/en-US/)
After we started using this, we were able to downsize our garbage can from…
this 35 gallon can that our neighbors have…
…to this 20 gallon can that we now have
which also saves money on the garbage bill.
Since it is garbage collection day tomorrow, I thought I could take some pictures!
Three grocery bags full of recycling. We already separated them into paper, plastics, and
cardboard
The garbage that is going to the landfill-our trash for the week: we used to have to take out the
trash twice a week, now we only have to take it out once a week.
I forgot: This is how I found out the information about what can go in the garbage, recycling, and
yard trimmings:
This handy little set of cards was
given to us by the city of Oakland. It gives information about each of the three different curbside
pickup bins. Inside, it has everything that can and can’t go into each of the bins! That was really
nice of them. Whenever I’m in doubt, I can always just refer to this. Going to go put this on the
fridge!