Round II

The second week was much harder than the first...well parts of it were harder anyway. I'm not really having trouble reducing the amount of electricity I use or the amount of meat I eat, but I cannot seem to figure out a way to produce no waste. We traveled to North Carolina for cross country and it is extremely hard to survive a trip like that without producing any waste. Everything is packaged excessively and I could hardly figure out any way around generating trash. We went to sandwich places and ate in the airport at least 50% of the time we were there. I kept trying to get around things that were packaged, but it was impossible. I also think that its really hard to produce no waste at all in a day. At first I was only associating waste with the packaging of the food that I ate, but it encompasses every other aspect of life as well. Using a paper napkin to wipe a counter instead of a cloth is an easy thing to fix. I feel like in America there is no escape from producing waste in some manner, but because of that I will be much more conscious of how I can reduce how much I throw away.

I think it is really effective for SEAK to have compost bins around campus, because there is one very close to my apartment. This makes it extremely easy for me to take banana peels, apple cores, egg shells, etc to the bins instead of throwing them away as I did before.

Despite the difficulties that I'm having eliminating the amount of trash in our apartment, my roommate has become more conscious of her use of electricity as well so we are drastically reducing our electrical use! :)