You receive a list of refuse collected over a week, documented by a member of a house, that is all you know so far. What can you find out about this person and their household from their trash?

Well it turns out quite a bit… You can tell what kind of nutrition they are getting, what kind of medication they are taking, how much caffeine they drink, how much alcohol they are using to balance against the caffeine, what they like to cook and eat, what kind of appliances they are using in their household, how many roommates they have, how many pets they are cleaning up after, what they do in their free time, what kind of entertainment they are consuming, what their interests are, what part of town they live in and the list goes on and on.

It just happens that little bits of our life are left in the trash on a daily bases, if you take the time to look through someones trash you might just get to know them quite well. Don’t believe me? Try it yourself! I was doubtful when trying this myself, but some thoughtful analyzing brought me heaps of information, all from a small bag of refuse. We might be “what we eat”, but even more than that “we are what we throw away.”

Our class engaged in a short garbology project in which we recorded our garbage habits for one week. Everyday I cringed at how much plastic ended up not in the recycling bin, but in the trash. Even with only one week of recording, I know from here on out I will work towards keeping unnecessary plastic out of my trash.

Plastic is not biodegradable. No natural process can break it down. It photodegrades instead. Plastic particles divide into smaller and smaller particles which are called nurdles. These nurdles are very hard to get rid of once they are mixed in with other refuse.

Nurdles do not go away – like other plastic over time they just fragment into smaller and smaller plastic particles.

After reviewing the King County plastics recycling website, I was surprised to learn that yes, many plastics are recyclable but the codes and symbols you might see printed on the plastics does not necessarily mean the product is recyclable anywhere and/or anytime.

“Resin codes (indicated by the small number enclosed by the “chasing arrows” ) are often misleading to the consumer because they were not intended to indicate if the plastic is actually recyclable. Rather they indicate what general type of chemical compound is used to make the products. The codes are not a guarantee to consumers that a given item would be accepted for recycling in their community.”

The disconnection between what people think is happening about their trash habits and what is actually happening had been ignored until the findings of the Garbage Project by Rathje was reported in 1973. Consumerism is directly linked to garbage and the more we engage in buying, the more garbage we accumulate. Thinking about our consumer goods as pre-garbage may be a way to shift our thinking and eventually our shopping habits. Also buying goods and packaging with “post-consumer recycled’ content should be a good way to ‘vote with your dollar’.  Understanding the processes in which we buy, consume, discard and recycle is important for advances in environmentally friendly waste management.

I am also thinking about future archaeologists. What will our garbage say about the way we lived our lives? What other stories about us will be evident in hindsight? What will they find out about us that we do know already know about ourselves?

Certainly, your trash can answer mundane questions. If you find a candy wrapper in some hidden trash can in the laundry room, you might discover someone has been sneaking treats. You might sneak through your neighbor’s—though that is ill-advised—and find out something surprising about them! Trash has even been seen as a window into the lives of our favorites celebrities: how else would we know that Bob Dylan once misspelled vanilla as “vannilla”? (Rathje 2001, 17)

However, archaeologists have been using trash to gain even deeper insights into the day to day lives of people. In fact, archaeology of garbage makes up most of our understanding of past human lives outside of written record and living structures! Just think, every activity you’ve ever done likely resulted in some amount of garbage, which was deposited along with the garbage from everyone else in your area for that entire day. What would that kind of material tell us about the people in your area?

By itself, refuse can show us what people are eating, what people are wasting, and what people are reusing. However, archaeologists also relate current events—such as food shortages—to their data to see how different stressors affect habits in regards to refuse! Do people waste more of the breads they regularly buy, or specialty breads like hot dog buns or pretzel rolls? Does a shortage in sugar cause less or more sugar to be discarded? Trash reflects some quirks and irrational behaviors people pick up under different conditions such as shortages or repetitive diets.

Challenge yourself to consider what your trash says about you this week. Its stories might surprise you!

What stood out the most to me from the classmate’s refuse I looked through were the items from the dorm, as well as the tea bags and cough drops. They used nine bags of tea and several cough drop wrappers in seven days. It’s rather clear this person is a student by looking at their garbage, and unfortunately, they’re sick. When I compare their refuse with mine, I can’t help but feel ashamed of all the recycle and plastic I threw into the garbage. Sure, they had a few plastic packages from the UW Bookstore, or the comic store, but it doesn’t add up to be nearly as much as mine. I wonder if this is due to the locations in which we live. For one, it’s clear this person lives in a dorm on campus. With commuting three hours in the morning and three in the afternoon, I clearly live several miles from campus. After moving in the beginning of November, I’ve noticed a distinct difference in the ways we dispose our items in my household. We used to be able to frequently recycle because the transfer station was “just up the road”. Literally, you could make a right turn out of our neighborhood, and within seconds it was the next right. The ways in which we leave our mark through trash has a lot to do with our location.  Now, it’s not that we stopped recycling entirely. It’s just that we aren’t recycling everything anymore. Occasionally, aluminum cans or plastic yogurt containers will end up in the garbage. This lab has definitely motivated me to start separating the recycling more, and taking the extra step to ensure recycled items don’t end up in the garbage again.

The last two weeks where interesting. In my class we started a garbology lab where each student records there garbage for a week and another student analyzes your records. At the same time my car got stolen on the first week and in the second week I got sick, again. But despite those set backs I still feel I learned a lot from this project.

When analyzing my data from another student I found that food waste including food wrappers can tell a lot more about a person than just there diet. For example I concluded that they might live with multiple people because there was 4 take out containers thrown away at the same time. Additionally 4 of the same drink was thrown away at a similar period and 4 other similar drinks where thrown away after that. Also If the recorder put prices on there trash (like mine did) you can get an idea of there income. There are most likely many other interpretations of food waste that inform more about an individuals habit but at the moment I haven’t figured them all out yet.

Thanks for listening!