Do you feel like living without garbage for a year?
Well, do ya, punk?
Switching from a Dirty (Harry) lifestyle to one without trash is a pretty huge challenge. But that’s the idea behind the Green Garbage Project, a project taken on by an American wife-and-husband team. Their goal was to generate as little trash as possible over the course of 12 months – no small task, given that the average American throws out around 4.5 pounds of trash a day.
Why? As the couple explain on their website, they were always environmentally conscious people – buying eco-friendly products, using green bags, and the like.
“But no matter what we did, it never felt like we were making an appreciable difference,” the authors say. “The trash still piled up, landing in a dump somewhere to stagnate for years to come.”
As it turns out, our heroes were up to the challenge. All of the trash they generated over the course of the year weighed in at three pounds.
Trash and Climate Change
For every bundle of paper that comes from a virgin forest, the world loses trees – and trees are some of our best natural defenses against climate change. That’s because trees store carbon that otherwise would be released into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas.
In fact, around the world, deforestation accounts for about 16 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
So cutting back on trash isn’t some artificial, meaningless activity. It has an actual impact, not just on the trash that gets thrown in our landfills, but on the climate of the entire world.
Team Earth’s climate challenge is about just that sort of everyday action – and bringing enough people together to make sure those actions have an impact.
You might not be able to cut back to three pounds of trash a year. But you can take a step like cutting back on the amount of forest products you use. And you can join the Team Earth movement.
Go team!
(Hat tip: Treehugger)
Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/baggis/ | via Creative Commons
