Edgar Padilla Fierros

My water bill is added as a utility through my rent, so I personally didn't know how much water I was using in my household, so for this week's topic of water I looked into to it. I reached out to the property managers and inquired about how to check the water meter for my apartment and if there was a way to see the exact charge for water through a bill of some sort. They were very happy to assist. Turns out we don't have individual meters outside the building, but are instead inside the unit, with a handy LCD screen to read water usage as it happens. The sent me a copy of our unit's water usage from last month, and we used a bit less than we did this time last year. but now that I can read our day to day usage i can more directly see the impact I personally have. Since I struggle with long showers I used the meter to start shortening my showers. So far I have shortened it about 5 minutes on the days I work, and about 15 minutes on my days off. While I wish I could reduce the work day showers more, a long hot shower after a 12 hour shift is still a necessity. But now I can better track usage, and work to find even more ways to reduce water waste.

This week was spent learning a lot about the items and appliances that use the most water, I initially wanted to learn how to reduce water waste with my laundry, as I always felt it would be one of the most wasteful, but I was mistaken. Our current washing machine weighs the amount of clothing and adjust the amount of water per load. I had assumed it used the same amount of water every time with every load, knowing that now, I have begin rethinking how to do my laundry, by optimizing the way I sort laundry and measure how my loads I can keep water waste to a minimum while optimizing load size/weight.

Overall I'm happy to have been able to get help from the property managers and for their transparency regarding billing to best adjust my water usage. And lowering my water waste in my showers

This week I did not do good, like at all. I did not meal prep for work like I usually do, relying on prepackaged food from Costco. I did not shop local, and did not give a second thought to where my food came from this week. However looking back to that, I can use that as a stepping stone to where my shortcomings are. My time management got out of hand so I had to cut corners in my food. Which showed me an amount of prepackaged food I purchase out of convenience, and it was not a number I am proud of. But now having a baseline I can set achievable goals for substituting unsustainable foods, with appropriate items. And look into learning how to cook these things myself from scratch. But I will say, the packaging was disposed off accordingly to minimized that waste at least.

I love going to the movie theater, and I really wanted to watch the new Super Mario movie, and do a little window shopping. Thus instead of driving out to Clackamas Town Center, like I usually do, after class on Tuesday I took my longest, to date, ride on public transit. From Kenton out to Clackamas on the Max. The ride was fine, I have an annual TriMet card from work, so the cost was negligible, however the real challenge was timing. Because of the length of the ride there and back, plus movie, I had to be more attentive to that. This aided me in lowering my time at the mall, saving me both money and plastic waste as before this class I learned about PopMart. I also went through and made sure all the electronics I have are not on "sleep" more, or "quick start". And unpluggin what I could, air-fryer, pc, amps and speakers, toothbrush chargers, and lamps we dont use. Since we rent, there isn't much I can do about changing lightbulbs, they're all already LED ones and replaced by maintenance crew, appliances are there, and can't be replaced, but I did adjust the temperature on the fridge to lower energy consumption but stay within food safe window.

Eco-Challenge ONE:

This week we talked about waste, and upon reflection and inspection I realized a lot of my waste and trash comes groceries. So this week I challenged myself to both shop local, both in location and sourced, and meal prep as much as I could realistically fit in my freezer and fridge. To do this I took public transit to a local Co-op grocery store (Alberta Co-op Grocery) which is near my home. They source a majority of their products from local farms and farmers. Including the things I already had from previous grocery run I had enough for a few meals.

I also found I have a lot of meal prep containers that have gone unused for a while. So my roommate and I prepped our meals for the week;
3 pasta dishes (work lunch)
4 freezer breakfast bowls (days off breakfast)
6 dinner dishes (3 for work nights, and 3 for days off)

While I do have room to store more prepped meals to cut down on food packaging, I couldn't carry more back from the store and would need a second trip or a car. Considering hunting down or borrowing those little foldable wagons from one of my neighbors.

This grocery trip saved me 38 miles of driving round trip, cutting down my gas usage. This also prevented my stop at any fast food places cutting out single use containers and wrappers. And time, where the drive along would have been a little over an hour round trip.

Altogether I would say this was a great success, but can be improved upon by taking better inventory of what I already have, what I know is available at this grocery store, and a better way to bring things home.