MAKING A MUSEUM: Materializing Regimes of Value with the NYC Department of Sanitation

What Does Your Trash Say About You?

It is said that one is able to gather a good deal of information about a person’s behavior and activities just by looking through their garbage. I know for a fact that if you were to dig through my trashcan in my apartment in Brooklyn Heights, you would probably find this view to be true and come to some interesting conclusions about who I am as a consumer. For example, the empty Starbucks cups (and let me emphasize here on cups in the plural) would reveal that I visit the chain on a regular basis, and some would argue almost to the point of obsession. Amongst the coffee cups, you would also find used napkins and brown paper bags from Chipotle Mexican Grill, again showing my loyalty to a specific chain. Other products found inside my trashcan include Orbit gum wrappers, an empty Baked Lays potato chip bag, Yoplait yogurt containers, and Heinz ketchup packets. If you were to search through my trash on a weekly basis, you would find all of these items repeatedly, because I stick to certain products and do not tend to make changes.

With this idea in mind, that if I personally held to specific brands and buying patterns, surely those in my neighborhood did too, and so for the next two weeks I set off to try and find out what those were. Of course I would not be able to fully grasp the consumer patterns of my fellow Brooklyn residents considering the time restraints, but I could at least try to begin to understand what their garbage revealed about them. According to the book Rubbish!, garbage in the United States is like a “mirror of American society,” and like my garbage, I definitely found that to be the case here with the population of Brooklyn Heights. I chose to concentrate on just a couple of residences because to go around the entire neighborhood and observe their trash would probably be an entire semester’s project within itself.

I started off by first observing my own apartment building’s habits and behaviors and found out some interesting things. Now, I have to add that my apartment building is all NYU graduate housing, so even before I looked at the garbage bins outside I assumed I would come across bottles of wine and beer, or fast food packaging, being as we are students; we hardly have time to cook our own dinner and having the occasional drink is not at all far from the truth. However, what I found in the plastic bags that lined the curb outside my building surprised me; instead of bottles of alcohol, there were bottles of water, and not just any particular brand either. There were bottles of seltzer water, Smart Water, tonic water and various mountain water brands. And instead of McDonald’s bags, I found discarded boxes of Lean Cuisine and other sorts of healthy prepackaged food. It seemed that graduate students were healthier than I had given them credit for!

The next apartment building I focused on (about a couple of blocks away from mine) produced almost the same results as my building, with the exception that more families seemed to live here. The reason I came to this latter conclusion was because there were a lot of Capri Sun juice boxes (very popular with the kids and easy to put in a lunch bag) as well as fruit snack boxes (such as Fruit Roll-ups) and dinosaur shaped chicken nugget boxes (such as Kid’s Cuisine). But like my building, water bottles overflowed their plastic bags (mostly of the Perrier brand), as well as other healthy beverages such as Tropicana orange juice (which was pretty much the only brand I came across) and milk cartons (of no particularly dominant brand, but usually skim or 2%). Another interesting observation I made was the brand of magazines, usually Shape, Self, or Men’s Fitness, again confirming my findings that my neighborhood was concerned with its health.

Of course just by observing these two residences for a couple of weeks, it is hard to decipher which individuals/families like which brands, or whether they chose to buy something merely because it was on sale. However, for the majority of the part of what I observed, the people in my surrounding neighborhood generally lead healthy lives. This is not to say that they never eat fast food, or they never drink soda or alcohol, but during the course of two weeks of observing their trash, I found that on the whole they like to take care of their bodies.

As I pondered about my behavior and the behavior of those around me, I started to consider Maya’s blog entry titled “Trash Talk.” It was about a website she had found that focused on a project people were experimenting with; for two weeks straight, you had to live with your trash and refrain from using a trashcan, this way people would become more aware of how much waste they actually produced. I thought to myself, if I were to test out this little project, what would it say about my waste habits and how would it affect my consumer patterns?

Now, I’m just taking a guess but I would probably come to find that I drink way too much coffee and spend way too much money at Starbucks. Instead of paying four dollars per drink, I could save more money by buying some generic coffee brand and making some at home, which would also reduce my consumption of paper cups by using a ceramic mug instead. Or I would come to find that I should also cut down on the Chipotle runs, because 1) it’s not entirely healthy to eat here all the time and 2) like Starbucks, it’s expensive and I could save the money and buy more groceries. What would my fellow Brooklyn residents find of themselves? Maybe they would find that they should drink more skim milk instead of 2%, or maybe they would cut down on the bottled water and reduce their consumption by buying a filtered water container like Brita or Pur. Living with your trash, like I told Maya, would be a good experiment to see your patterns of waste but it’s almost pointless because it will all end up in the trash anyways. And like I said before, I would probably cut down on the Starbucks and Chipotle, but you would still find these items in my trashcan, because I'm a girl who needs my caffeine somehow, as well as my occasional Mexican fix.

References
Jex, Maya Gibley. Trash Talk. MAKING A MUSEUM: Materializing Regimes of Value with the NYC Department of Sanitation Blog. Sept. 27, 2007.
Rathje, William and Cullen Murphy. 2001. Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage. Tempe, AZ: U of Arizona P.

View of my trashcan with Chipotle remnants

Bottled water outside my apartment

View of the street where I observed the other apartment building

Tropicana orange juice, which was the dominant orange juice of choice in my neighborhood

SHAPE magazine outside other apartment building