Family of 4. 31 Days. 8,441 miles. 17 National Parks and Monuments. The first 10 days we collect all of our trash! The last 21 we learned to travel zero-waste! Subscribe and help us learn to preserve our Earth.
The task of collecting our trash has become, even after just one day, both extremely disappointing and daunting. We are having a great time as a family; however, the amount of trash we have accumulated in the first day is sickening. This is the disappointing part. The daunting task is storing all of it for ten days. Something has got to change.
The idea that we, as Americans, just throw stuff “away” is a fallacy that all of us have bought into because of the consumerism in America. After you have something and you need to part with it, well, one throws it “away”. However, there is no “away”! It either goes into the land, air, or water. Let’s discuss the former.
Landfills are taking over our country. Just look at the growth of landfills since 1937. [You must see the animated graph attached.] When we say, “Throw that away!” what we are really meaning is, “Put that in the trash can, so it can be taken to the landfill to exist for 50-5,000 years.” We, the people of the last 81 years, are the only people who are absent-minded enough to do this. Now, I don’t want evidence of my lunch around in 500 years. It was good, but not that good.
We stopped at Jason’s Deli and got our lunch to go. This created a LARGE amount of waste, much of which cannot be composted or recycled. I briefly spoke with a manager, and he alluded to the fact that there wasn’t a place around to recycle what could be diverted from the landfill.
Dinner was different. We stopped in at little local establishment in Iowa, and learned that portion sizes are way too large, everywhere. Besides walking out of the restaurant with four straws, four straw wrappers, two salad dressing containers, two plastic cracker wrappers, two aluminum foil pieces from our baked potatoes, two cocktail sauce containers, seven napkins (the ketchup bottle spit on my daughter), three butter tubs, and a sour cream tube, we also walked out with almost a pound of food waste! I exited with an undone waist button and a loosened belt. I tried to eat everyone’s food, so we didn’t have to put it in the van – Fail! [See my wife’s video at the end of the slide show for our solution to our problem.] The three Tidy Cat litter tubs don’t look like they will be large enough for all of our trash. Already, eating like a “typical” traveling American family is taxing our space and pocketbook. So we might need to adapt a bit along our journey.
Still yet, our children have also commented about all of the waste that we are starting to pack into our van on the first day – they are losing space. As we look at different items (example = Jason’s Deli salad container) we are trying to think of different ways to reuse the items. Samantha made the great suggestion that we could use the salad container to put our lunch meat in when we go to the deli after day ten. That seems a long way away…
On a lighter note, we have already met some amazing people with which to share our story. Additionally, Samantha and I are already pretty exhausted of the “Duck Song” which, unfortunately, our kids enjoy. Mostly because it annoys us. Ha! Payback from our parents, I guess!
Speaking of payback, it is probably time that we go back to living like the generations before us. Those generations bought what they needed, did without, reused everything they could, and valued time, money, and resources, seemingly, more than we do today.
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