Environment

The Garbage Challenge

A challenge to limit your throwaways to one bag per week

This is where a lot of it ends up. Thanks to Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash

What if one of your crowning achievements wound up to be a pile of nothing?

Saving the environment is a collective responsibility and the best thing we can do for our planet is to become more acquainted with what goes into the garbage. The wide-mouthed goblin that lurks about in most kitchens and bathrooms is filled with earthly plagues.

Despite being removed from our homes, nothing disappears from the Earth. Everything that hitches a ride on the sanitation truck ends up in our landfills, oceans, rivers, or lakes. Garbage then transforms itself to be stored in the air through released gasses during decomposition and slithers through the earth to find its way into groundwater supplies. Garbage is alive and transformative. It is a traveler.

The absolute best we can do is to throw nothing away! That is, of course, not realistic. Everyone, no matter how efficient or environmental, creates a stream of waste. Our environmentalists who purchase recycled materials also partake in the stream. The manufacture of every new item creates more garbage and many times the by-product is toxic. Even a simple and useful product that is recyclable, such as paper, is created from a series of toxic processes that…