It started out as a normal Thursday.

Well, almost.

In addition to my normal routine, I had an assignment to walk around with a plastic shopping bag for the entire day. Every time I was about to throw something away, I had to instead put said trash item into said bag in order to discover how much waste I generate during the course of a day.

Just to clarify, I volunteered for this. No one forced me, I’m just one of those sick personalities who thinks an experiment like this is actually pretty intriguing.

Maybe I should have signed a liability release.

So, at 8:30 … no, 8:45 … no, 9:10 a.m., I dragged myself out of bed and headed off to volleyball class, Savers bag in tow. Class was cancelled, so I signed in and headed back to my dorm. Since I wouldn’t be sweating that morning, I decided to forego the usual bottle of water and just take a swig from the water fountain — after all, that saves garbage.

One of the things I found most interesting during my “trash day” was the range of comments I received from my friends. Walking past the library, I stopped to greet a couple of my classmates. When they asked what I was up to, I explained the plastic bag, proudly declaring my intention to discover what a wasteful person I was.
One of my friends nodded encouragingly and observed, “You’re going to need a full-size garbage bag for all of your junk!”

I muttered, “I know where you live,” under my breath, and kept walking, head held high. I was doing a public service.

In class, I shoved my half-full take-out box from the Caf into the bag, trying to act nonchalant. I felt like I owed the entire class an explanation. I still don’t know if they were all judging me, or if any of them even noticed.
I had signed up for office hours with a professor prior to finding out about this assignment, so I sheepishly walked into his office at 4 p.m. The strong scent of mashed potatoes didn’t seem to faze him, but that didn’t keep me from feeling paranoid for the entire meeting.

Garbage is embarrassing.

After my roommate found out I had been carrying my trash around for five hours, she exclaimed, “You’re so gross!”

I again proclaimed that it was all for the advancement of journalism, and noticed indignantly that she had neglected to take out our room trash. What a slob.

At the end of the day, I surveyed the remains: some nasty leftover pasta, a package from a one-load sample of laundry detergent, the page from my absentee ballot that never made it in the mail … all kinds of random stuff.
Honestly, I thought I would end up with way more trash than I did. Maybe I just wasn’t feeling particularly wasteful. Or maybe it was the fact that I subconsciously tried to throw fewer things away, knowing that I’d have to carry all of it with me.

Our world is full of trash, but that doesn’t bother us as long as we don’t have to think about it. Keep our trash away from us and we don’t care what happens to it. What kind of reduction in waste would we see if our trash was always in front of our faces?

Maybe we should all walk around with plastic bags and see what happens.