For this week, I ultimately decided to go for a walk outside. It's something that I wanted to do more of and sense I was spending the weekend at the coast. I thought this would be a great opportunity. I walked along the beach and around with my friends. I had fun and great time. This is something I am looking forward to do in the future. It may not be everyday but I can still aimed do to more walking in nature.

This week I decided to try and reduce my waste by creating an art project for an architecture class using only reused materials. I'm an architecture major, and in my program we do lots of hands on art projects and model making. This does however require us to purchase a lot of material such as wood, cardboard, and chipboard. People don't usually use all the of materials that they buy, so we have a reuse room where we can drop off scraps from our projects for other people to repurpose. However, most of these materials are cut into odd shapes and sizes, and don't always meet to requirements of what we're looking for. So they usually end up getting thrown away or recycled in the end anyway. It kind of disappoints me how much waste we create in the architecture program. At the end of the term or after a big project, the trash bins and the reuse room are overflowing, and I am unsure about how much of the material actually get properly recycled.

I had a project that I was working on this week, and I wanted to challenge my self to use nothing other than the scraps that I found in the reuse room. Sometimes, working with scrap materials can be challenging because not every piece will suite your needs perfectly. But thats part of the fun, seeing the potential in every piece. It was really fun working with just reused materials this week, and I plan to try and use as much recycled material as possible going forward. I won't bore you all the with details of the assignment, so heres a picture, and you can interpret it however you like.

This week’s discourse on waste was quite eye opening, especially the portion of class where we went through our own garbage. When rummaging through my garbage, I noticed that: 1) almost all of the waste came from food packaging and 2) most of it was either plastic or cardboard. Being an environmental science major, sustainable and green approaches to management (especially waste management) are something that is always on my mind and is also something I should practice as much as I preach! So, to address this waste dilemma, I decided to recycle as much of my waste for gardening, as it is a big hobby of mine and Spring is the perfect time to begin such a task.

This week I tried to reduce the amount of takeout coffee cups I use. I usually buy 1 to 2 cups of coffee a day, so I decided to get a reusable coffee cup that I can just clean at home instead of throwing out 10 containers a week. Decided to reduce this first because it is one of my biggest throwaway items and I can easily weigh how much I am throwing out. Each cup was around 9 grams while the lids were around 7 grams, which was more than what I would have thought. The cups are made of paper, but have a plastic waterproof lining, so they have to go into the trash. Converting to using a reusable mug ended up reducing my paper cup usage for the week by 90 g and the lids are completely made of plastic which save 70 g.
By switching I no longer will be throwing out a pound of waste every 3 - 4 weeks, I did not realize how much it ends up adding up just by myself. My main obstacle for me was being consistent for the week. The cafe I go to was super cool about letting me use my own mug instead, which when I change things up sometimes, I get anxiety about it. It was cool to try and do, now I just have to be more consistent about it. Will be focusing more on meal prep and shifting away from plastic meal prep containers as the weeks go on.

This week, I reduced food packaging waste by preparing 8 20-ounce containers of food, 2 of which I’ve already eaten, instead of buying ready-to-eat meals and snacks. Everything is weighed out, and this system has already proven effective in satiety, meal timing, and improving my eating habits.

While building the recipe for each container, I also tried to think more carefully about using more environmentally friendly whole-food ingredients for my eco challenge post on waste. I reflected on food waste/spoilage, packaging, the environmental impact of ingredient choices, and the tradeoff between convenience, shelf life, and sustainability. Because this came together during a busy time in my life, I couldn't find all my ingredients without packaging this week, but I still built awareness and a design for a recipe around some lower-impact ingredients. Each container includes 100 grams of broccoli, 100 grams of black beans, red onion slices, avocado oil, and 170 grams of 99% lean ground turkey.

I have been using a lot of single-use plastic or paper utensils and cups this year. Something to think about, too, is plastic lining in paper cups or in canned goods. It almost feels inevitable to have some form of plastic in our food products. It also makes me think of how studies have shown an increasing amount of microplastics in people's bodies, which is not good to say the least.

I chose to commit to only printing double sided from now on. As a student, I have to print a lot of papers and projects, so acknowledging this commitment feels good, no matter how small the impact may be!

I checked my water footprint using the water calculator. I've actually done a personal study of my water footprint before, and lucky for me, I live in a building that doesn't let me use a lot of water. This is mostly because of low-flow toilets, I handwash my few dishes, low-flow shower heads, and so on. Where most of my water use comes from seems to be from 2 things. One is diet, I eat meat daily, which requires a lot of water, and secondly, is just the fact I live in Portland, and electricity requires water. And that latter part really surprised me. Now I can't do much about where I get my electricity, as I'm in my dormitory, but maybe I can do something about my diet?

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.