View the online visualization here.
Design Statement
For my topic I wanted to see how much trash I consume over 10 weeks (70 days). As for measurement, I measured how many 13 galloon trash bags I filled up over the course of the 10 weeks. My end result was nine filled bags, which I wasn’t expecting to fill up that many bags alone. I chose this topic because I would like to make a change for the better and I think waste is a big problem in the world today.
For my data collection process I made four trash type categories: paper products, plastic, aluminum cans and glass. Each day I would track how many of each type of trash product I used and then recorded it. It was difficult at first because there are so many different factors that play a role in this type of data collection. For example something that I didn’t account for in my data but wish I had, was the size of the pieces of garbage that I was throwing away. Some days my trash would fill up faster because I would receive a package or two. With a topic like this one, it was hard to narrow down which categories to use because there is so many different wasys I could have collected the data.
At first I wanted write down every single piece of trash that I threw away which became too much, not to mention there was no real way of measuring that method. Another troublesome factor that I incountered was accuracy. The data I collected, only counted the trash that I throw away at home into my nine garbage bag. It did not count the items I threw away outside of being at home. I chose to use a pie chart, two types of bar charts. I tried to use colors that would not clash so I used colors that were opposite on the colorwheel. As I collected the data, I noticed a decrease in how much garbage I used. I think that was due to the fact that I started to realize how wasteful I was being and started managing my habits. Which I probably shouldn’t have done until after I was done conducting the experiment. I was surprised how much paper products I used. I expected to have found that I used plastic products the most but that wasn’t the case.
A few trends that I noticed from graphing my data was that on Sundays I typically used paper products more so than on any other day. This is because Sunday’s are my cleaning days and so I would use a lot more paper towels and Clorox wipes. Another trend I noticed in my data was the use of aluminum cans on Tuesdays. Most likely from cooking beans for taco tuesdays. In doing this assignment, I now realize that majority of my garbage comes from food products. Therefore if I were to continue this experiment, I would change it to where I only would track my trash from food packaging. I think it would be fun to see if I could be zero waste or waste free. It would not only be benficial to the planet but also my heath.