6 ms·

All my trash for a year fit into two plastic bags

44 points by sonabinu 11y ago

trevyn 11y ago
Based on the Kardashev scale of technological advancement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale), I think we should be trying to use more energy and resources, not less.
- vacri 11y ago
  I don't see how the author deciding to use plastic forks again is going to get us a Dyson sphere.
  - jtriangle 11y ago
    Just to advocate the unpopular for a moment, it could be that a consuming more means a need for more energy which eventually leads to needing new ways to create energy. So, consumption drives innovation to enable more consumption and so on.
- m3rc 11y ago
  Why shouldn't we exploit everyone in less developed countries when we can rationalize it away by saying some theoretical model totally allows for our behavior?
- benten10 11y ago
  You are of course joking, because the absurdity of 'trying to use more energy' for something that can be done more efficiently, aka 'wasting' energy to be considered more 'advanced', according to an arbitrary scale, is immediately obvious. : )
  - trevyn 11y ago
    I'm really not. The principle is that advanced civilizations are able to harness more energy. I'm going to assume that if you're on HN, you're generally an advocate of technological progress. I could use very little energy by living like a caveman, but is that really the way to the future?
oberstein 11y ago
> Five months into the experiment, after some initial reservations, I gave up toilet paper. Now I do things the way hundreds of millions (including my extended family) in India do — with water and my left hand. That's pretty gross. What's the delta for the energy cost of doing that, its use of extra water and extra heat and extra soap for the water to clean his hand, with the energy cost of a few squares of toilet paper and less water and heat and soap?
- Karunamon 11y ago
  That one struck me as a "wait, what!?" as well, especially considering a few paragraphs down, there's: We don’t have to go back in time to heed environmental boundaries. ..pretty sure not using sanitary toilet paper in favor of touching feces is "going back in time", and I'd place using more water as a greater environmental issue than using less of a product that can be made from recycled things anyways.
  - Scoundreller 11y ago
    > using more water as a greater environmental issue He's in Michigan, they're not running out anytime soon. The water gets recycled too, in minutes/hours instead of decades for trees. It's going back to (probably) the same lake it came from, not letting it evaporate on a farmer's field.
- NhanH 11y ago
  You have to wash your hand in both cases. And from experience, I do not think using toilet paper means that I used less water and soap when washing my hand. Also, if you think it's gross then this is what you're looking for: http://www.amazon.com/Joy-Bidet-D1-Adjustable-Certification/dp/B00FPZUJRO/ http://www.amazon.com/Joy-Bidet-D1-Adjustable-Certification/... .
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- natdempk 11y ago
  How could this possibly be practical or sanitary? Did he do this in public restrooms? Why didn't he consider a bidet?
jacobolus 11y ago
Does anyone know of any good systematic studies of the waste / environmental costs of various activities, purchases, etc.? I suspect that e.g. living in a smaller house or apartment, driving less and driving a smaller vehicle (more generally, living in an urban area with less pavement and other infrastructure per capita compared to suburbs), better insulating buildings (or constructing them with other passive heating/cooling) and scaling back the temperature control, using less hot water or heating it less, reducing water use on yards/landscaping, reducing use of energy-intensive gadgets (e.g. drying clothes on a line, using a smaller television), consuming less meat and dairy, buying local vegetables in season instead of shipped thousands of miles, and otherwise eating more canned food and recycling the cans, taking local vacations vs. traveling internationally, etc. might have more effect than explicitly trying to optimize only for quantity of personal trash generated. One problem with our current economy is that our prices do a terrible job at signaling true costs, and the whole system is so complex that any individual person has almost no chance at guessing correctly, if trying to organize their life to reduce external impact. (So much of the price we pay is distorted by some clever company arbitraging international tax differences, cheating regulatory controls, defrauding poor countries and bribing their officials to cover it up, or dumping unlimited toxic shit in places without any oversight.) It’s like trying to optimize code without a profiler. As one small example, I’d love to see some kind of systemic analysis of the comparative environmental costs of ordering something online and having it delivered in a truck from a warehouse wrapped in cardboard and then recycling the cardboard vs. driving a single person in a large car to and from a store 10 miles away, including the land and energy costs of keeping inventory in the local stores, employing the cashiers, etc. Personally I little idea what the total impacts are of these two choices.
- Scoundreller 11y ago
  Directly, or indirectly, I'd say that the price of a product does a good job of the value of resources expended in getting it to you. This includes: The cost/time of the marketers of the product, the cost/time of its production, the cost/time of whatever services are paid for through taxes on that product, etc. I just wish taxes did a better job of taxing relatively irreversible destruction (like oxidizing 100m old C-C and C-H bonds). If you spend less money, you burn up fewer things in the process, which I think your examples exhibit quite well. Though I'd suggest that flying/trucking food thousands of kilometers means expending less energy than preserving it or risking spoilage. The food may be fresher to boot too.
mikegioia 11y ago
This is wonderful and I've been trying to drastically reduce my consumption for about a year now. I cannot over-emphasize how difficult it is, and not even from an implementation standpoint. The problem isn't the person trying to consume less, it's everyone else. Everywhere you go (in NYC) you get bombarded with packaging. Going to get a cup of coffee involves a paper cup, a plastic lid, 5 napkins, and then they throw it all in a brown paper bag. I've seen people buy a soda at the bodega and with it comes napkins, a straw, both in a brown bag and then all of that in a plastic bag! I watch in horror the person pull the can out, throw everything else away, drink the can and then toss that out too. I start to wonder how far removed we all are from the landfills and production to be completely oblivious to this insane level of waste. The worst part about it is that when you repeatedly say "no bag, thank you" you get looked down upon like some loony toon who can't function in society correctly.
- thrownaway2424 11y ago
  Coffee in a bag is the most hilarious thing in NYC. And the coffee is awful, of course. I decided to give up paper coffee cups a few years ago. Now if I'm in a hurry I just order an espresso and drink it on the spot, or if I'm not I order a drip coffee and spend a few minutes relaxing and drinking it. Of course, NYC has a bad relationship with the environment. They love trash there. http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-worlds-most-wasteful-megacity http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-worlds-most-wasteful-me...
  - dplgk 11y ago
    I wonder how many usernames are filling up the landfills?
Mz 11y ago
Interesting article and kudos to him, but: I made a few exceptions. I couldn’t always control other people’s behavior, so junk mail wouldn’t count as my own recycling. I wasn’t going to be a boor and instruct a dinner-party host on how to reduce his or her trash. And if someone gave me a gift — a token offered from the heart — I accepted it. Also, I was working on my aerospace engineering Ph.D. in an experimental combustion lab, and my research required many single-use materials: Mylar, latex gloves, ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene (milk carton material), optical cleaning wipes and so on. If I wanted to conduct quality research and finish my dissertation, I’d have to separate requirements inside the lab from my habits outside it. So, his junk mail, social life and job/education did not count. I wonder how much those things account for the typical 1500 pounds annually and how much trash he "produced" that way without counting it.
- pavel_lishin 11y ago
  If we're counting anecdata, the amount of junk mail I receive could probably fit into a shopping bag. The amount of gifts + wrapping I get could probably fit into three, but I also make it pretty clear that I don't really need material gifts. My job is a fucking disaster, I drank at least twelve cans of carbonated water today, and I currently have literally six at my desk, not all of which are empty. I wish we had a soda fountain.
fizx 11y ago
I've recently considered doing this, not because I particularly care about generating a moderate amount of trash, but rather because I think that this would be an excellent mindfulness exercise!
jqm 11y ago
I live on a couple of acres and there is no trash collection. We have to take all our trash into town. I started composting a year or so ago. Not little barrels or bins or anything like that. I wanted to the compost to get hot and be able to really bury green kitchen wastes so animals didn't pull it out. So every few months I have been buying a large (500-600 pound) bale of ruined moldy hay ($10 at a hay yard near here). I cut the strings and fluff the hay up with a pitchfork. Then I add a quart or so of fertilizer and wet it. Then I pile it into a cone and wet it again. The cones are about 5 feet tall initially with maybe a 5-6 foot diameter base. I keep my eyes open for any additional organic matter I can add. All the weeds, leaves, grass clippings... I even added some tall weeds I cut from the roadside this summer. We bury anything compostable in the pile. All vegetable scraps, paper plates, paper towels, cardboard egg cartons, paper towel and toilet paper rolls, I even put in a couple of big (non-shiny) cardboard boxes that were completely consumed. About twice a month I turn the pile over. As the pile starts breaking down and shrinking to the point it doesn't really heat up anymore I start another one. At the end I have a tiny little pile of compost maybe 2.5 feet cubed. It's amazing how much all that stuff breaks down. It's a lot of work but the compost is really great for the lawn and gardens. I couldn't buy something of similar quality. I estimate it's cut our trash by about 1/3 and importantly it also keeps most organic matter out of the trash which makes it less stinky (we don't eat much meat and the dogs help with the scraps from the little we do). Composting is a lot of fun. It's like farming microbes.

44 points by sonabinu 11y ago

Based on the Kardashev scale of technological advancement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale), I think we should be trying to use more energy and resources, not less.

vacri 11y ago
I don't see how the author deciding to use plastic forks again is going to get us a Dyson sphere.
- jtriangle 11y ago
  Just to advocate the unpopular for a moment, it could be that a consuming more means a need for more energy which eventually leads to needing new ways to create energy. So, consumption drives innovation to enable more consumption and so on.
m3rc 11y ago
Why shouldn't we exploit everyone in less developed countries when we can rationalize it away by saying some theoretical model totally allows for our behavior?
benten10 11y ago
You are of course joking, because the absurdity of 'trying to use more energy' for something that can be done more efficiently, aka 'wasting' energy to be considered more 'advanced', according to an arbitrary scale, is immediately obvious. : )
- trevyn 11y ago
  I'm really not. The principle is that advanced civilizations are able to harness more energy. I'm going to assume that if you're on HN, you're generally an advocate of technological progress. I could use very little energy by living like a caveman, but is that really the way to the future?

oberstein 11y ago

> Five months into the experiment, after some initial reservations, I gave up toilet paper. Now I do things the way hundreds of millions (including my extended family) in India do — with water and my left hand. That's pretty gross. What's the delta for the energy cost of doing that, its use of extra water and extra heat and extra soap for the water to clean his hand, with the energy cost of a few squares of toilet paper and less water and heat and soap?

Karunamon 11y ago
That one struck me as a "wait, what!?" as well, especially considering a few paragraphs down, there's: We don’t have to go back in time to heed environmental boundaries. ..pretty sure not using sanitary toilet paper in favor of touching feces is "going back in time", and I'd place using more water as a greater environmental issue than using less of a product that can be made from recycled things anyways.
- Scoundreller 11y ago
  > using more water as a greater environmental issue He's in Michigan, they're not running out anytime soon. The water gets recycled too, in minutes/hours instead of decades for trees. It's going back to (probably) the same lake it came from, not letting it evaporate on a farmer's field.
NhanH 11y ago
You have to wash your hand in both cases. And from experience, I do not think using toilet paper means that I used less water and soap when washing my hand. Also, if you think it's gross then this is what you're looking for: http://www.amazon.com/Joy-Bidet-D1-Adjustable-Certification/dp/B00FPZUJRO/ http://www.amazon.com/Joy-Bidet-D1-Adjustable-Certification/... .
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
natdempk 11y ago
How could this possibly be practical or sanitary? Did he do this in public restrooms? Why didn't he consider a bidet?

jacobolus 11y ago

Does anyone know of any good systematic studies of the waste / environmental costs of various activities, purchases, etc.? I suspect that e.g. living in a smaller house or apartment, driving less and driving a smaller vehicle (more generally, living in an urban area with less pavement and other infrastructure per capita compared to suburbs), better insulating buildings (or constructing them with other passive heating/cooling) and scaling back the temperature control, using less hot water or heating it less, reducing water use on yards/landscaping, reducing use of energy-intensive gadgets (e.g. drying clothes on a line, using a smaller television), consuming less meat and dairy, buying local vegetables in season instead of shipped thousands of miles, and otherwise eating more canned food and recycling the cans, taking local vacations vs. traveling internationally, etc. might have more effect than explicitly trying to optimize only for quantity of personal trash generated. One problem with our current economy is that our prices do a terrible job at signaling true costs, and the whole system is so complex that any individual person has almost no chance at guessing correctly, if trying to organize their life to reduce external impact. (So much of the price we pay is distorted by some clever company arbitraging international tax differences, cheating regulatory controls, defrauding poor countries and bribing their officials to cover it up, or dumping unlimited toxic shit in places without any oversight.) It’s like trying to optimize code without a profiler. As one small example, I’d love to see some kind of systemic analysis of the comparative environmental costs of ordering something online and having it delivered in a truck from a warehouse wrapped in cardboard and then recycling the cardboard vs. driving a single person in a large car to and from a store 10 miles away, including the land and energy costs of keeping inventory in the local stores, employing the cashiers, etc. Personally I little idea what the total impacts are of these two choices.

Scoundreller 11y ago
Directly, or indirectly, I'd say that the price of a product does a good job of the value of resources expended in getting it to you. This includes: The cost/time of the marketers of the product, the cost/time of its production, the cost/time of whatever services are paid for through taxes on that product, etc. I just wish taxes did a better job of taxing relatively irreversible destruction (like oxidizing 100m old C-C and C-H bonds). If you spend less money, you burn up fewer things in the process, which I think your examples exhibit quite well. Though I'd suggest that flying/trucking food thousands of kilometers means expending less energy than preserving it or risking spoilage. The food may be fresher to boot too.

mikegioia 11y ago

This is wonderful and I've been trying to drastically reduce my consumption for about a year now. I cannot over-emphasize how difficult it is, and not even from an implementation standpoint. The problem isn't the person trying to consume less, it's everyone else. Everywhere you go (in NYC) you get bombarded with packaging. Going to get a cup of coffee involves a paper cup, a plastic lid, 5 napkins, and then they throw it all in a brown paper bag. I've seen people buy a soda at the bodega and with it comes napkins, a straw, both in a brown bag and then all of that in a plastic bag! I watch in horror the person pull the can out, throw everything else away, drink the can and then toss that out too. I start to wonder how far removed we all are from the landfills and production to be completely oblivious to this insane level of waste. The worst part about it is that when you repeatedly say "no bag, thank you" you get looked down upon like some loony toon who can't function in society correctly.

thrownaway2424 11y ago
Coffee in a bag is the most hilarious thing in NYC. And the coffee is awful, of course. I decided to give up paper coffee cups a few years ago. Now if I'm in a hurry I just order an espresso and drink it on the spot, or if I'm not I order a drip coffee and spend a few minutes relaxing and drinking it. Of course, NYC has a bad relationship with the environment. They love trash there. http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-worlds-most-wasteful-megacity http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-worlds-most-wasteful-me...
- dplgk 11y ago
  I wonder how many usernames are filling up the landfills?

Mz 11y ago

Interesting article and kudos to him, but: I made a few exceptions. I couldn’t always control other people’s behavior, so junk mail wouldn’t count as my own recycling. I wasn’t going to be a boor and instruct a dinner-party host on how to reduce his or her trash. And if someone gave me a gift — a token offered from the heart — I accepted it. Also, I was working on my aerospace engineering Ph.D. in an experimental combustion lab, and my research required many single-use materials: Mylar, latex gloves, ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene (milk carton material), optical cleaning wipes and so on. If I wanted to conduct quality research and finish my dissertation, I’d have to separate requirements inside the lab from my habits outside it. So, his junk mail, social life and job/education did not count. I wonder how much those things account for the typical 1500 pounds annually and how much trash he "produced" that way without counting it.

pavel_lishin 11y ago
If we're counting anecdata, the amount of junk mail I receive could probably fit into a shopping bag. The amount of gifts + wrapping I get could probably fit into three, but I also make it pretty clear that I don't really need material gifts. My job is a fucking disaster, I drank at least twelve cans of carbonated water today, and I currently have literally six at my desk, not all of which are empty. I wish we had a soda fountain.

fizx 11y ago

I've recently considered doing this, not because I particularly care about generating a moderate amount of trash, but rather because I think that this would be an excellent mindfulness exercise!

jqm 11y ago

I live on a couple of acres and there is no trash collection. We have to take all our trash into town. I started composting a year or so ago. Not little barrels or bins or anything like that. I wanted to the compost to get hot and be able to really bury green kitchen wastes so animals didn't pull it out. So every few months I have been buying a large (500-600 pound) bale of ruined moldy hay ($10 at a hay yard near here). I cut the strings and fluff the hay up with a pitchfork. Then I add a quart or so of fertilizer and wet it. Then I pile it into a cone and wet it again. The cones are about 5 feet tall initially with maybe a 5-6 foot diameter base. I keep my eyes open for any additional organic matter I can add. All the weeds, leaves, grass clippings... I even added some tall weeds I cut from the roadside this summer. We bury anything compostable in the pile. All vegetable scraps, paper plates, paper towels, cardboard egg cartons, paper towel and toilet paper rolls, I even put in a couple of big (non-shiny) cardboard boxes that were completely consumed. About twice a month I turn the pile over. As the pile starts breaking down and shrinking to the point it doesn't really heat up anymore I start another one. At the end I have a tiny little pile of compost maybe 2.5 feet cubed. It's amazing how much all that stuff breaks down. It's a lot of work but the compost is really great for the lawn and gardens. I couldn't buy something of similar quality. I estimate it's cut our trash by about 1/3 and importantly it also keeps most organic matter out of the trash which makes it less stinky (we don't eat much meat and the dogs help with the scraps from the little we do). Composting is a lot of fun. It's like farming microbes.