Weigh Your Waste

For this sustainable behavior challenge, I first did the nature.org calculator, which said my footprint was about 23 tons of carbon dioxide, which is apparently below the national average.  Not bad.  My feelings however changed a bit with the footprintnetwork.org calculator; though their estimate of my footprint was 18.7 tons, the primary point made was that if everyone lived like me, we would need 4.4 Planet Earths to provide enough resources.  A little unsettling, I have to say.  This definitely makes me realize that the “it isn’t me” mentality the places the blame on everyone else around me isn’t necessarily accurate.  So what can I do to maybe change at least one of my behaviors?

When the sustainable behavior challenge was announced in class, I started thinking about different things I could do for it.  Once it was mentioned that it should be something we might be somewhat uncomfortable with, one thing popped into my head almost instantaneously; weigh your waste.  At least once a semester, LEAP comes to the dining halls to weigh how much food you’re about to throw out from your meal.  I always feel like they come to the dining hall on the day I put something on my plate that I don’t like and ultimately don’t eat.  It is then kind of embarrassing to bring my still-full plate up to the scale for the weigh in.  Therefore, I have decided to try and throw out less food after meals.  Though not the biggest source of my carbon dioxide emissions, a significant area on the pie chart outlining my carbon footprint was my food and diet.  Maybe throwing out less food can help reduce my carbon footprint and in addition, help me be less wasteful in other areas of my life.

I definitely anticipate there being some challenges with this behavior.  First, as an athlete, I arrive at dinner everyday feeling like I can eat three full plates of food.  Once I start eating, this isn’t the case and it’s very apparent that my eyes were bigger than my stomach.  Also, since the food in the dining hall is not always what I might expect, I’ll take a serving but then realize I don’t want it after a bite.  If I don’t like something then I won’t eat it, but then all this food goes to waste.  It definitely should be interesting to see how this behavior evolves over the semester.