One Week Challenge
The Full Garbology Challenge: everything you need to be a garbologist for a week
- Collect your garbage for one week, its easiest to start collecting in the morning and tally the day's collection in the evening.
- Keep the garbage in a container that can be carried around throughout the day. (This can be a bag, box, Tupperware, bucket, whatever you want--but probably something with a lid. Have a airtight container within this for food scraps.)
- Don’t change your routine to make less garbage, the point of the study is to learn from our current habits.
- SAVE EVERYTHING!!! Keep all items that you produce other than biohazard type items (used Kleenex, toilet paper, etc.) Even if you would normally recycle an item, it needs to go in the daily collection.
- At the end of each day, log all the items you produced in a notebook or on a computer, divide them into the three categories (Recycle, Compost, and Waste), and weigh each category. Be sure to record every item, how many of each item, and how much each category weighs.
- Write down the following figures: Total Weight, Total # of Items, and Weight and # of Items for each category.
- This is a good point to take a picture, because the Recycle and Waste categories will be stored until the end of the week, but food scraps should be thrown away after the picture.
- At this point we recommend you write in a journal, explaining how your day went or what you thought about the experiment. This can be a good way to reflect on what you learn.
- When the week ends you can make a graph showing how much garbage was produced each day. Try using a line graph and plot each of the three categories with a different color to see how they compare.