I would’ve never thought trash could say so much about a person. This past week, recording all the items that went into my apartment’s garbage made me realize 1) how much trash my roommates and I produce within not even a week, 2) I absolutely hate sifting through garbage, and 3) people like to wait until the garbage gets overfilled because we’re all too lazy (or too busy, if you wanna be nice about it) to walk all the way down to the dumpster in the garage (at least in my case). Also, spending half of my time – just in this past week – out of the apartment made it a bit harder to collect data since some days would go without recording refuse since it wouldn’t have been a control of how much, and what my collective household throws away. Otherwise, this was a very informative assignment.

This assignment also included the chance to analyze and interpret someone else’s garbage. They separated their refuse into garbage, recycling, and compost, and shopped at Trader Joe’s, ate lots of organic food, you get the idea. Then we were to infer from that what kind of person they were and honestly all I could say was that

they’re probably ten times healthier than me;

probably use public transportation and/or ride a bike, or own a Prius;

and they probably remember to bring their reusable shopping tote(s) to the grocery too.

From their descriptive data I could only infer these things, but I’m honestly hoping I’m like, 80% correct. It’s like the world is saying we are our own trash. If you ate a lot of meat, we would probably find empty bacon wrappers, meat packages, maybe chicken wing bones or T-bones. We could infer you really like your protein for working out after (who knows?). If you’re in an Asian household, you’ll probably never find expired foods because “IT’S STILL GOOD” according to my Asian mom, and will be left in the fridge until spring cleaning; but you can almost guarantee you’d find some Spam cans, some Seafood City or H-Mart take-home packages, sauce packets with foreign names, noodle wrappers, and some black hair-dye (secret: that’s how Asians stay young).