Mayo Costanza

For this week's topic about food, I decided to try to eat as many meat-free meals as I could throughout the week. As someone that is very active, I was a bit nervous trying this and being able to still give my body enough protein and calories to keep up with the amount of exercise that I do, but I found that it was quite a bit easier to do than I thought. I ended up having some amazing meals throughout the week as well. After a 4 hour long tryout for an ultimate frisbee club team, we went to eat at a food cart pod in north Portland and I had an amazing falafel sandwich from a food cart. Falafel (and tofu) have definitely become some of my favorite alternatives to meat. This week I also made salads for multiple meals, consisting of cranberries, goat cheese, strawberries, walnuts, rice, and balsamic dressing. Some of these ingredients I had ended up purchasing from the PSU Saturday Farmers Market in effort to buy locally. I didn't end up making every meal this week meat free, but I definitely did my best and learned that it is more of a viable option than I thought, and I will continue to try to consume less meat in the future.

This week I took a trip with our club volleyball team here at PSU to Arizona where our team competed in the club nationals tournament. With energy being the theme for this week, I thought that a aspect to focus on would be laundry. When I go on trips I am definitely an over-packer. I want to be prepared for everything and I often end up bringing much to many clothes that I end up washing when I get back. For this trip I tried to be very diligent with how many sets of clothes I brought. I reused clothes on the trip and was very intentional with how I could pack/use the least amount of clothes as possible. I only ended up bringing one bag with me (which was also really convenient for traveling) and only ended up adding a small pile of dirty clothes to my laundry when I got home. Laundry uses huge amounts of energy and I know that that is one thing that I can try to limit on a daily basis. I always wash my clothes on the "cold" setting and use the "low heat" option for drying. I even try to take out my clothes before the dryer is done if I have put in a smaller load.

For this week's eco challenge about waste I chose to be more diligent about using reusable bags when grocery shopping. I went to get groceries 3 times this week (at either Trader Joe's or Safeway) and also purchased a few more cloth tote bags from Trader Joe's so that I had enough to carry everything whenever I need groceries. Previously I had usually forgotten to bring reusable bags with me and therefore needed to use disposable bags in order to transport everything home. This week I chose to be very intentional with limiting the waste I was causing by forgetting to bring my own bags. I have noticed that this simple topic of using bags when purchasing goods is extremely prevalent in consumerism. Almost all stores that you walk into will have plastic bags and will automatically bag your purchases, even if those bags only serve the purpose of transporting those goods from the store to the parking lot. An article from The Center for Biological Diversity shares facts about plastic bag use, including the astounding fact that 5 trillion plastic bags are used every year! Imagine if everyone had their own reusable bags and used them every time they went to the store, not just for groceries but for everything! This topic got me thinking about waste in other ways too. Waste, in this context, is primarily defined as "unusable remains", but what truly makes something unusable? So many people, including myself, will throw items in the trash that we think no longer serve a purpose, but is that objectively true? If we all start to think about the definition of waste more, can we hold ourselves more accountable to evaluate the uses of items we are likely to throw away? I believe that living more sustainably and contributing to waste less is not just about buying reusable grocery bags, but it is a shift in mindset, thinking about how we define waste and how we can base our actions on whether something will be wasteful or the reusability of something.