Methods

To help illustrate the impact of not setting aside organic waste, I decided to weigh my garbage to show what percentage of my average household trash is comprised of compostable materials. By blogging about this process, I hope to show the tradeoffs between maintaining a compost heap and the environmental impacts of taking no action.

Variables:
I live in a two person town home in a rural section of the foothills with a couple of pets. I am obsessive about recycling so items such as bottles, cans, junkmail, plastic bags etc. do not make their way into the household trash. While I do have a very modest back yard area, I am not responsible for landscape maintenance so a lot of the wood pulp products needed for composting had to come from thieving and borrowing.

Process:
For the month of March, all trash will be weighed before it gets thrown out and recorded. Once April starts, I will begin a compost pile and weigh all of the food scraps and inputs that would have otherwise been thrown into the trash. I will compare this figure to the numbers from March to get a rough estimate of average organic waste. It should be worth noting that I do cook the majority of my meals, breakfast through dinner about 5 days a week.

Sources of Error:
Though I will do my best to keep this as impartial as possible, this is not conducted under laboratory type conditions. Due to fluctuations in weather, financial stability, seasonality of produce and other unforeseen factors, the amount of food waste produced is subject to change from week to week or month to month. To make attractive visual representations of statistics, liberties will be taken with the assumption that my habits mirror those of other people my age.