I recently traveled to New York and I was able to have personal experience with the trash of New York City. I was able to understand the waste workers reading a lot more as I was in the city of the DSNY. New York being such a heavily populated city there is a lot of waste that people and businesses produce.
I can understand how the trash piles up when the sanitation workers are unable to fulfill their job due to traffic, strikes, or some other reason.
I also took notice of the amount of waste that I was producing. Eating out frequently meant having containers for leftovers, leading to more trash.
I believe if there was more motivation to reduce waste or a greater focus on recycling and food waste disposal, much of the trash could be minimized.
However, it really depends on the time and education invested in making these changes.
I personally feel that people generally believe the responsibility for trash is no longer theirs once it leaves their personal property or home. While I understand this in some cases, it’s easier to not worry about it and let it be out of sight. Dealing with the amount of waste we produce becomes less impending and exhausting once it’s out of mind.

I rescued an Omen magazine the Dakin living room’s trash bin, finding it in good condition. This retrieval sheds light on our throwaway culture, as discussed in our readings on consumerism. Objects are often discarded prematurely, contributing to unnecessary waste.

The decision to discard the magazine likely stemmed from a mindset assuming its exhaustion of utility, neglecting the enduring value it might hold for others. Our discussions on sustainable practices underscore the importance of reevaluating such attitudes.

Leaving the magazine for someone else to find could have extended its life cycle, aligning with a more sustainable perspective that values reuse and repurposing. This experience prompts reflection on the discrepancy between an item’s perceived value by its original owner and its potential usefulness to others, advocating for a more mindful and sustainable approach to possessions.

Food waste. I think food waste is a category of waste that I feel most personally responsible for. I try hard not to waste food, and I feel like a shit bag everytime I do. I feel bad when I go to a restaurant and the table next to me is full of the scraps of another person’s meal, and I’m not allowed to  eat it, I have to let the waiter take it away and throw it in the trash. And then I have to order my own food, when I would have been fine with the food from another person’s table. My uneaten food becomes someone else’s responsibility the second it is out of my sight. It shouldn’t be like that. I don’t want to think like that. I’m a damn sheep in an oppressive system! A sheep! And I hate it! I don’t know who deals with my food waste next, and I think that has been deliberately done. Look what individualism has done to us. Individuality is a made up idea that does not exist in nature. Separation is how they control us. They have stolen us from each other! And then they pretend we have a choice. If it isn’t accessible to the BIPOC community, to the poor, or the disabled, then it’s not real. They have forced me into complacency! I will never forgive them for it.

Michael F. Maniates writes “When responsibility for environmental problems is individualized, there is little room to ponder institutions, the nature and exercise of political power, or ways of collectively changing the distribution of power and influence in society”. They make it inescapable. Only those with privilege can separate themself.

Building off a previous post, I consider clothing waste part of my responsibility in terms of making ethical decisions for its next destination. Clothing waste is heavily normalized in American society, and there’s also a stigma when it comes to second hand clothing. I feel like part of being responsible for your clothes is understanding the corrupt clothing industry filled with child labor and hazardous work environments, which helps you come to terms with your privilege. Additionally, I mainly consider it to be within my control when it’s in my possession, which can be a harmful way of thinking about waste. I think it’s a somewhat appropriate point to mark this division, however going back to the idea of knowing the ins and outs of your waste, can make you of proper consciousness.

In class we talked about the Peddle people and garbage industry and how peddle people has benefits of humanizing the waste workers to outside viewers. The waste industry is one often overlooked by most as a poor job and for those less fortunate, but with peddle people they work in their own time making as much money as their work load making for a more casual job and less competitive environment. We talked as a group on how peddle people are more approachable and enforce a sense of community and as a local business with different groups for each town meaning they are more flexible when there’s a complication. The reading showed the importance of the waste industry that is often seen poorly by outsiders.

My mother majored in environmental studies in college and made sure to teach me and my brother how to recycle. When it comes to recycling as waste, I would consider that my responsibility. My responsibility to make sure that everything I am recycling is actually recyclable and making sure that I am recycling everything that I can. I also extend that responsibility to my surroundings and the people who surround me. I make it my responsibility that my friends and family also recycle properly and as much as possible. I have even extended this responsibility to my community. My high school doesn’t actually recycle. The bins are all there, they teach us how to do it properly, and that it is the right thing to do and then all the bins get dumped in the trash. For most of my childhood I wasn’t aware of this so my responsibility ended when the correct recycling went in the bin, but when I realized this it started to extend to where the bin went. I tried for years to figure out how to get my school to recycle and I was never able to. I still want to try to solve this problem but when I was in high school the problem felt bigger than me and it didn’t help that all of the adults were telling me there was nothing I could do. It feels like my responsibility is to make sure that all possible recycling gets recycled properly but the problem is just too big for one person.  

After the recycling leaves in the recycling truck it could go to a recycling plant but there aren’t many or it could get shipped over to malasia where it will simply be burned. There is really no way of knowing whether my recycling is going to actually be recycled it is a scary idea. But lets say that it does get recycled. Then the single stream recycling will be run through this super interesting machine with magnets and air jets and all kinds of cool things to separate all of it into its respective types. The small pieces will fall throught at the beginning and then the cans and other metals will be caught by magnets. Then the plastic and paper get separated by a sorting machine that sucks the plastic up. Then the paper and plastics get packaged into bales and sent on to the next stage of recycling. The paper is recycled by adding water and turning it into a pulp. Some glass is broken down into a sand to be used on beaches and during natural disasters. I assume the plastic and aluminum are melted but unfortunatly this is where my knowledge of recycling ends. 

In my house back home my mom had our towns recycling key sheet up in the kitchen so you could check not only the type of plastic but also the different ways you could dispose of them. Already with our campus having compost and recycling bins I have been trying to be more conscious of sorting my food/compost, recycling and trash. In an ideal world I believe that this should be common, a good 50/50 between consumer and corporation. The creators of the product should have recycling and the environment in mind when creating and packaging their product, the community should have easy access to different levels of waste and it should be on the person consuming said product to then bring it to the necessary places it needs to go. Not a flawless system but with tweaking and work from all sides I do feel that we could easily solve the plastics problem. Reading about waste workers especially the garbageman’s stories really put it into perspective how one sided  the concept of waste removal is in our country. It depends entirely on overworked, underappreciated people trying to keep up with entire towns and cities worth of waste. A basically impossible task. So in the end I think it’s a much more simple issue that we have made extremely complicated, like trying to untangle string we have somehow created a knot.

I have chosen to talk about cardboard. A lot of the time it’s a hassle to keep around the broken down boxes, so my family and I often recycle them. My responsibility is to break down the box, so it fits better in the bin, and to make sure that I am putting the right waste products in the correct location. After they are in the bin or wherever they belong, I don’t think it is my responsibility anymore. It is on the laborers job to take it to its next location. I know at my old job at a consignment shop, I would break down the boxes and when the store was slow bring them out back and put them in the recycling dumpster. I often saw that other people weren’t breaking them down or anything else, just throwing in complete boxes which is a waste of space. I don’t know who took those specific dumpsters because we opened after they came, if I remember properly, but I think it was a big truck that would load it in the back and then go to other recycling dumpsters in town and take them. I know that we also had a regular trash dumpster too, so maybe for all I know the garbage people threw it all into the same truck!

When I recycle, I take personal responsibility to make sure I am conscious of what I can recycle. This is something that I do to help the work of those who then have to take it from the front of my house. Especially when it comes to plastics, I check the recycling number of each item to ensure that they can be taken to the recycling center. I also take it upon myself to make sure that the plastic is as clean as possible, removing any food and rinseing it off. I try to remember to remove the labels, but I do not always remember. This is the responsibility that I have given myself because I can, meaning I have the time and resources available to me for me to take these extra steps. The moment that the recycling leaves the front of my house I no longer feel responsible for it. I do not know if my efforts help in any way or if it all just ends up in landfills. I have not researched how my recycling center follows through and how they process the plastic. Because I do not have access to the recycling I don’t hold any responsibility for it, the kind of “out of sight out of mind” mindset. I think that taking the responsibility of sorting recycling is not something that everyone can do. I believe that there should be more transparency on what happens once your recycling or trash is picked up. I think that people would be more inclined to do more if they were able to see that it makes a difference. In my years of recycling I have not thought much about waste workers, I have only become more aware of them because of my own research and discussions like the ones that we have in class. I do not know what their work is like, I can only imagine from what I have heard and read. I imagine that their work involves a lot of sorting, each type of plastic is recycled in different ways and there are entirely different procedures for other materials like paper and cardboard. I also think that there is so much that they have to throw away due to them not being able to process it.