June 10th Update - David

Week 2 Waste

    Garbage                                             Plastic

Week 3 Waste

    Garbage                                             Paper (The bag is flat: about 3 cm thick)

    Plastic

As this project goes on, it becomes increasingly difficult for my family as a whole to abstain from food waste. In week two, the total amount of garbage had shrunk considerably, and the plastic had even more so. This on the surface appears very good, but when we take into consideration the fact that both my father and sister were out of town that week, it is less impressive. Still, the waste was reduced  to a much more manageable size. In week three, the waste levels had increased to be comparable to week one. There were several factors that I believe contributed to this. The first is that all four members of the household were home this week, naturally leading to an increase in food consumption. Secondly, a few large plastic ice cream containers were emptied that week, though they had been in the freezer for some time. Finally, and most critically, it is increasingly difficult to continue to motivate this lifestyle direction to a group of people who are used to a certain way of living. As such, in the final weeks of the project, I will be focusing primarily on motivating this change to my family members.

May 27th Update - David

We are now partway through week 2 of our Eco Action Project. In Week 1, we were shopping as normal to establish our typical waste throughput. I live with my family of four; here is what we generated on the first week.

Garbage	Hard Plastic
Cardboard	Soft Plastic

For scale, the ruler is 30 cm. As week 2 is not yet complete, we have no data regarding that yet; however, as we were consciously avoiding waste while shopping, it already appears as though there will be less waste this week. However, since our sustainable shopping didn't start until this week, we will still see carry over from the first week for a while yet.

One of the biggest challenges I have encountered was motivating my family to be on board with this project. We already recycle or compost most of our waste and use canvas bags for groceries, but convincing them to avoid plastic when shopping was very difficult. A lot of food seems to only come in plastic now; meat and bread, for example. We haven't yet found a place to buy meat, but I have been making bread and bagels by hand at home to meet our family's need.

I was unable to convince my family to track compost waste. Most of it (vegetables, coffee grounds, teabags, etc) is put in our composter in our backyard where it decomposes naturally. The rest (eggshells, meat, bread, etc) is put in a separate bin for collection by Oak Bay's kitchen waste collection program. I don't foresee much change in compost waste over time, but as I was unable to track it, I can't give an accurate representation of that.