Final Project Part 1 - Plastic Free! (Trevor Denstaedt)

In order to fully understand the amount of disposable plastic that I and others go through in our daily lives, I observed the normal college house that I share with three other guys that go to school up here at Tech. It turns out that us college students use more than our fair share of these plastics whether it's in the water bottles we take to class, the garbage bags we use to collect empty cans and bottles from our houses in, or as shown below for simple easy jobs like collecting spare change or storing our leftover soup and pasta from the night before.

The convenience of having these easy alternatives makes them so useful for us as college students who usually take any chance of saving time in our daily lives and run with it. I myself never realized how often I just simply grabbed a water bottle between classes, instead of filling up one of the many refillable ones that I have at home, or as a big milk drinker, would just simply throw away my half gallon of two percent when I was done with it. The challenge of living without these things that have just become part of my daily routine was much more difficult than I imagined, as it was impossible to judge just how much I use on a daily basis revolves around the plastic containers themselves! All my favorite pop, and juices come in them, as well as simple things like laundry detergent, and many more. Now many of these daily habits had easy enough fixes to find, and were things that I could have already been doing! For example, something as easy as collecting all of the empty cans and bottles in a larger plastic tub, and taking that to the bottle return eliminated the wastefulness of going through two or three garbage bags for the same process, and just washing the tub allowed for further use in the same way. Just filling up a glass of water while at home, and bringing a sports bottle with me to campus saved the multiple empty plastic bottles i would have produced otherwise in the same amount of time. 

                                                

                                                

Me and my roommates could be so much better about our recycling, and these two days proved it to us even more! Some sacrifices of a few seconds here and a few seconds there can mean the world!