365 Days of Waste

This is a post about a blog, 365 days of waste , and the remarkable man behind it, David Chameides, an award winning cameraman who lives in Los Angeles. About a year ago, (339 days at the time of writing to be precise) he decided to collect all the waste he generates in a year in his basement, and keep a blog that describes his detritus. He keeps a diary describing in what’s going on in fine detail:

Today’s Haul:

1 paper plate - worms
1 piece tin foil - recycle
1 plastic can concentrated grape juice HDPE 2 - recycle
1 cardboard coffee cup - recycle
2 ear plug thingys from doctors appointment - garbage
1 ear plug otoscope plastic cone from doctors office - garbage

So i went to Coffee Bean for a meeting and I bring my mug as usual. I got a chai tea latte and the guy behind the counter uses a cardboard cup to mix in and then pours it into my cup. Crazy.

A deep green by nature — he also runs a website called Sustainable Dave — he has been keeping all of of his trash — including recyclables and organic waste like food — stacked neatly in the basement of his Los Angeles house. He uses a tin box to hold bags of waste paper, and cans of garbage to hold the rest. For organic waste, he put in a worm composter that breaks down leftover food. Beyond that, he didn’t create a master plan for his year of no trash. “I didn’t really think this through — which is probably for the best,” says Chameides. His wife and kids are exempted from the challenge, but not from the neighbors’ scoffs. “My wife’s friends do make fun of me.”

Not only does Chameides carefully pack away any waste he creates at home, he also lugs back trash he may have produced outside the home. Sometimes far outside: On a recent vacation to Mexico with his wife, Chameides dutifully tagged and bagged all the things he would have thrown out, and brought them back with him to the U.S. When he encountered security officials at the airport in Mexico, they were understandably confused. “The woman in the security line opened up my bag and saw all the trash,” says Chameides. “She said, ‘Que esto?’ [What is this?] I told her, ‘Basura’ — garbage. They just laughed and zipped up the bag.”

It didn’t take long for Chameides to figure out that the best way to reduce the amount of trash he wasn’t throwing away was to simply cut back on the amount of stuff he consumed in the first place. Given that his nickname is Sustainable Dave, that wasn’t too hard. “I’m a non-consumer to begin with,” says Chameides. “After a month or two I became aware of just how little I was consuming.” Through about eight months, Chameides reckons he’s kept a little more than 30 lbs. of trash — most of which dates back to the first couple months of the year, before he got the hang of not taking out the trash. The average American, by contrast, would have passed 1,000 lbs by now. When the year is up, Chameides says he’ll probably have to send his collected waste to the landfill and the recycling center, but the simple act of keeping his garbage has reduced it. “It turned out that it’s not that hard,” he says. “I’m a pretty normal guy — I just keep my garbage in my basement.”

Video of David talking about vermicomposting, or worm composting

Though America’s landfills are in no danger of filling up any time soon, taking out the trash is increasingly costly, with major cities like New York now having to truck their garbage hundreds of miles to reach an open dumping space. That means energy and carbon emissions. Chameides decided to begin his year of no trash after he visited his community’s landfill. “It’s nearly 40 miles away, and they have 13,000 tons of trash coming in every day,” he says. “It’s going to close in seven years, and then they’ll have to ship the trash all the way to Arizona.”

Government and industry can play their part in reducing the trash stream by cutting back on unnecessary waste — especially packaging, which makes up a surprising amount of our garbage. That’s a symptom of the sort of culture we’ve become, one that’s disposable, that runs on unthinking convenience. Chameides shows that what we really need to do is simply slow down and think about the waste we’re creating, and the easy ways to reduce it, before we end up knee deep in our own garbage. “People ask me, ‘Why are you doing this?’” he says. “It’s because I want to know more about what my waste footprint is. I don’t want to be part of the problem, but part of the solution.” That’s a sentiment that even average Americans should be able to agree with.

via 365 days of trash