Tess's Trash Challenge, Beth Style

Tess Vigeland, of American Public Media's Marketplace Money, is carrying the trash she generates for two weeks in order to raise awareness of America's throw-away society.

Read About Tess' Trash Challenge.

Vigeland is challenging Americans to carry with them all their waste for two weeks. I have decided to sign up for the challenge starting tomorrow (Thursday). I know I'm already documenting my plastic waste, but it will be instructive to see how much non-recyclable non-plastic waste I'm also generating. Hopefully not much at all. And hopefully this will encourage me to to a better job avoiding paper napkins and paper towels and make sure that anything that can be composted is composted.

Here are Tess's rules for the challenge:

• No kitty or doggie poo (it's a health risk)


• No carrying into restaurants or malls where I could get kicked out


• Really smelly stuff goes inside extra Ziplocs


• If it's recyclable (or compostable), you don't have to carry it around


• Trash from work is included, as is trash from the rest of your household (i.e. if your honey tosses it at home, it goes with you...)

I am making some changes for my version of the challenge:

1) I'm not using any ziploc bags unless I can reuse some that I already have. Nothing new.

2) I'm not going to include my husband's waste. As I've mentioned before, we lead very independent lives when it comes to shopping and purchasing decisions, so if he buys things for himself that don't have some benefit for me, I'm not carrying them around with me.

3) She seems to be carrying around her trash in a regular plastic garbage bag. I'll be using either a paper bag or a BioBag instead.

4) I see no reason not to carry my trash into a restaurant if there's nothing icky in it. And since I compost and I don't have pet waste, I can't see why there would be.

If you decide to sign up for any part of the challenge, please let me know!