Lexi Ebert

For my food eco challenge I focused on packing food rather than buying it. Since I live almost two hours from campus on transit I'm usually there all day and eat at least one meal on campus per day. Normally I will buy my lunch but this week I made the switch to packing my lunch. I actually liked it a lot more than I thought I would, it wasn't as tedious as I had always feared it would be, and it saved me money. I was also able to reduce on food waste since I could pack exactly what I would eat and could much more easily bring home what I didn't finish.

For this weeks topic of energy I went with a simple task of making sure everything got turned off when not in use. This includes lights, appliances, and various technology. At first I found it to be difficult to remember to turn off things like the TV, which usually auto shut off after half an hour, but eventually it became a habit. The lights one was not as hard because I try to do that anyway but occasionally I do forget so I was trying to be extra vigilant about it this week. Overall this was a pretty easy task that helped me reduce my energy usage even if it was by just a little.

On the topic of waste I decided to look into sustainable fashion as the fashion industry produces a ton of waste. We ended up also discussing it in class on Thursday as well which was helpful. I did research into reasons for fast fashion and ways in which I can personally help reduce fashion waste. The biggest way I discovered to reduce fashion waste is to not throw out clothing from your existing wardrobe, rather, you can up-cycle it, give it away as hand-me-downs, or donate it if you must. It is also important to repair your clothing as it breaks, a lot of fast fashion is low quality and begins to fall apart after only a few wears, knowing basic sewing skills to repair rips, holes, or fraying stitches can keep a fast fashion wardrobe in use for many more years than intended. Fast Fashion came about as technology advanced and making clothes by machine and in bulk was possible, as well as the technology to spread information and trends. We can see this if we look at fashion through the eras, if I were to say picture someone from the 1800's we have a pretty clear idea of what their clothing looked like because it didn't change very drastically over the course of the whole century. If I say 1920's, 1940's or even 1970's very distinct looks come to mind as characterizing these decades, but as we reach the 80's the looks between the begging and end change quite a bit and by the time I say 2010's the looks change almost more than once a year. 2012 fashion is wildly different from 2018 fashion and they're only 6 years apart. After doing a lot of this research I went to go look at my clothing and assess how sustainable my wardrobe is. While none of my clothing come from sustainable brands and are almost entirely fast fashion I have only bought one new clothing item in the last 6 or so months, most of my clothing is second hand or thirfted, I repair my ripped or otherwise "ruined" clothes, and I wear all the clothes I currently own. I would therefore categorize my wardrobe as sustainable.