J500 Media and the Environment

I carried a bag of trash around for 24 hours. I’ve never been as intimate with my waste before, but at the same time I felt very disconnected.

Today was a bad day for trash , and this was due to the relative “convenience” of my waste. With sympathy towards Bobby’s post, I just didn’t have time to create a healthy lunch for myself, and had to resort to getting mysterious food from The Underground .

Some say ignorance is bliss, and sometimes I wish I could resort to that lifestyle. Before every action or decision I make, my mind initiates a long list of questions. Where did this come from? What is in this? How did it get here ? Who made this? Where will the unusable parts or trash go when I am through with this? The list goes on and on, and it can make life quite difficult and can make my conscience go nuts, but it is the consequence (and benefit to everything else) of my awareness.
Walking into the Underground made me really uncomfortable. It’s crowded, its noisy and everyone is flirting. I feel like my decision on what food to get and eat are being observed by everyone, and the notion of taking a huge Styrofoam plate for my salad makes me want to succumb to my empty stomach and run home for food.

What really is the convenience of these disposables? Not only does it wreck havoc on my conscience, but using disposable take out containers make up a large majority of waste and no where to put it.

Apart from my guilty consumption last night, I was also attending an “internationally themed” potluck for Environs, which meant for me, making about 40 delicious Vietnamese spring rolls. This lead to a disproportionate amount of personal trash, because I was cooking for about 25 people.

This waste from my cooking excursion included, plastic packaging for noodles, rice paper and tofu, as well as a lot of organic waste from preparing carrots, cucumbers, lettuce and herbs.

To offset my already abundant waste for the day, I knew I could do something with the peels and bits and pieces of unused vegetables. I unfortunately have no backyard and no garden, so composting was out of the question for me. Instead, I decided to save up these bits and pieces for a future vegetable stock! I bagged up the excess veggies, and threw them in a (plastic) bag and stored them in the freezer.

I felt a little better about diverting some waste, but it still makes me cringe to think of all the Styrofoam waste that the university and faculty and students partake in. When will KU wake up and become sustainable and KU Dining start using biodegradable disposables?

My bag of veggies for vegetable stock

A Day in Trash

The Recycling Center at my House

OK, I had to post one more photo because I saw everyone else had trashy pictures with their pets, and Ferdinand happened to be interested too

– Juliana Tran