In our consumer-driven society, producing trash occurs more regularly than bowel movements for most people. We use what we need, dispose of the rest and move on with little thought. Trash is removed from our sight and our lives as quickly as possible. We do not think of trash as a reflection of ourselves, but if we are what we eat, we are even more what we throw away.

Bard College performed abysmally in the 2009 Recyclemania competition, a contest between universities to promote recycling and waste awareness where recycling rates are carefully tracked. My college managed to recycle just 23% of its solid waste, while the most efficient colleges recycled over 80%. In the wake of the competition, a small group of students from the Environmental Collective and Zero-Waste Initiative clubs decided to conduct a waste audit in one of the college’s largest dorms. If our recycling rate was so low, what were we throwing away?

For the audit, we collected trash accumulated over ten hours from a dorm of about 170 people. From 10am to 8pm, the dorm generated almost 40 pounds of trash (not including waste from bathrooms, which we did not audit for health reasons). Of that, 12 pounds was compostable food waste and over 3 pounds were recyclable containers. Renewable materials, haphazardly thrown away, comprised almost a third of the waste sampled.

Sorting through the garbage of my peers was a strangely intimate experience. Though we remove ourselves from our trash, it remains a highly personal reflection of our daily lives. I saw what people ate and the products they used; the details of their day they did not give a second thought to. We inadvertently tell a story with our trash, though few ever bother to read it. The narrative here appeared to be one of convenience and carelessness; individually wrapped candy, beer bottles, paper cups and mounds of cigarette butts told of consumption without regard for the impact of the products consumed. Its difficult to imagine the life of a wrapper or tissue once it has performed its function and been disposed of, but these items do not cease to exist because we have removed them from our sight. If people were somehow able to see the mound of garbage they leave behind, perhaps people would take more care in reducing their waste. Armed with the data from our audit, we are preparing to do just that—raise the awareness of waste at Bard college with the hopes of encouraging a deeper sense of personal responsibility for what one throws away.

The students of this college and young people across America are living in an increasingly fragile world, and the salience of environmental issues is on the rise as the threats to our future become more visible on the horizon. The actions and attitudes we take today will set the course of our generation’s handling of unprecedented environmental crises. We need to cultivate an understanding of the real impacts our consumer choices have on the world around us, not just individually but on a societal level as well. These developments all start with the individual, and raising waste awareness on our small campus may be just a drop in the ocean, but hopefully the ripples it makes will spread.