Final Project Part 1 - Jacob Len

Over thanksgiving break I was tasked with paying attention to the disposable plastics that I used over a two day period. I made the point of not keeping track on the day of thanksgiving. I was expecting to use quite a lot of plastic, but in actuality I ended up not using an obscene amount. The majority of plastics that we used involved plastics that food came wrapped in. Oddly enough my family decided to eat Chipotle one of the nights for dinner and pizza the other night, which is very uncommon but they were celebrating me being home I guess. Neither of these dinners used any plastic. During one of the days I got up around noon and had a sandwich made out of some leftover chicken my parents had a couple of days before and a bottle of pop, my dad had a cup of coffee and some toast for breakfast and an apple for lunch, and my mom just had a cup of coffee breakfast and I believe she had a sandwich for lunch, I’m not completely sure what kind.

            My family likes to pride themselves on being relatively green. Therefore we try to reuse as much as we can, plus by reusing we are actually saving money. The fact that we reuse so much really limits our plastic use, we try to never buy pre-bottled water and we always try to buy as little disposable plastic packaging as we can, of course in the day and age we live in it is nearly impossible to use no disposable plastics, but a lot of the time we will reuse plastic containers that were used for something else before. We would wash it out and reuse it for something else, like a sort of Tupper where, or because my parents are both artists and paint a decent amount we will use it for a water tray for a paint brush. We also use the canvas bags when we go grocery shopping.

            After I kept track of the plastics I used for two days, I didn’t find it too difficult of an adjustment to not use disposable plastics. Both days I got up around one because, let’s face I am adjusting to the lack of sleep. After getting up I had an apple on the first day and an orange on the second day, for my lunch snack sort of thing. For dinner I tried to be very conscious of the plastic I was using and I managed to make it through both days without any disposable plastics, my parents didn’t but I wasn’t expecting them to do the challenge with me, I had pasta, the noodles came from a cardboard box and the sauce came from a jar, and because I was committed to doing this and couldn’t really find anything else around my house I had to do the same thing the next day, luckily though the following day was thanksgiving and I got a lot of good food.

            Over all it was a very interesting experience that I’m glad I did. It made me look at the world a lot differently very much like this whole class.