As I was loading up (and later disgorging) all the recycling it occurred to me (not for the first time) that our trash really tells a lot about us. After all, that’s what anthropologists use to discover the habits of ancient tribes. Broken pottery, gnawed bones, scraps of fabric, they all tell stories about how we live, our habits, our occupations, our family life. It’s what the police use to see if you’re a sneaky pete, too, right? Shredded documents from big corporations, tossed our hair color from someone on the run…it’s all in the trash, and it’s pretty telling. What story does yours tell? I’ll go first and then you follow, okay? Leave me a comment!
Let’s see, in our recycling which has been piling up, most of the glass was olive jars, pasta sauce, garlic, and a few beer bottles. The tin cans were almost exclusively vegetables and tomato based products. From this you can glean that someone has an occasional beer (not me), that we don’t do many fresh veggies, and that we like Italian food. Fair enough! Most of the plastic was milk jugs (2% and whole), applesauce, yogurt containers, coffee canisters, prenatal vitamin jar. From this one could possibly glean that there’s a coffee drinker or two, a woman who is considering getting pregnant, is pregnant, or nursing, and small children, possibly under age 2. Check. We had tons and tons of paper this time-credit card offers ripped up, free local papers, several months of magazines on cooking and home living, church bulletins, coloring pages. From this you could gather we’re not seeking extra credit, we attend religious services, we like to do home-living type things, cook, and have a child old enough to use crayons. Yup. Cardboard-electronics boxes, take out pizza boxes, the outer wrappings of outside toys. Someone likes to tinker with electronics, sometimes lazy enough to grab a pizza on the way home, it must be time to play outside. Yup and yup.
Our regular trash is usually one bag, and consists of food scraps, things that didn’t get eaten, and plastic wrap from foods or things that were purchased that can’t be recycled. From this I guess you’d gather that we can be wasteful at times, that we don’t compost, and that there’s little that we don’t actually put in our recycling.
What does your trash say about you?
I don’t think about my trash too much. We do some recycling of paper and glass and plastic, but aren’t obsessive about it. My husband tends to throw things in the recycling that aren’t supposed to go in there, so I have to pull that stuff out and throw it away. I feel like we generate more trash than we should, but actually, our bins are almost never full so perhaps we’re not as bad as I think. Driving around my neighborhood, it’s not uncommon to see them so full that the lid doesn’t close.