About the foods I usually eat:

How much of these foods come in different types of packaging?

– I would think that half the food i eat comes out of packagings because when i come home from school, i feel to tired to make myself a proper meal so i usually eat out of packaged foods. My mom, if she wasn’t tired, would make me food not really in packaging.

What kind of packaging materials are usually used (styrofoam, cardboard, plastic, bags, boxes, etc.)?

– Cardboard boxes and plastic bags are the most used packaging materials. Stuff like crackers, cereal and mac and cheese, are all both cardboard and plastic bag packaging foods. The only foods i know that might come out of styrofoam is instant noodles in a up but its rare because instant noodles mostly come out of plastic cup.

Why do you think that all of these materials were chosen specifically for the products purchased?

– I think that the cardboard box is to premote the foods with its pretty colors or flashy appearance. It’s also to have the serving size and the nutrition label on the box. The plastic bag inside the box is to preserve the food that’s inside better rather then just putting the food straight into the cardboard box.

How is packaging both positive and negative for the consumer (the person using it)?

– The packaging is positive in a way that there will be less of a mess for the consumer. The negatives is that the person has to spend more time dividing the packaging from the boxes to the plastic bags to the regular garbage and some people are just super lazy and wont do it.

What happens to these packaging materials once we have eaten the food inside?

– If you seperate the packagings to their own bins then they get recycled or reused. If the are put into the garbage bin however, then they are either put into landfills to rot or incinerators to burn and pollute the air.

Where is the packaging waste after one day? One year? One hundred years?

– Depending on the what kind of packaging everything is different. The most common packaging is plastic bags so i’ll use that. After one day the plastic bag will be compacted within other pieces of garbage. After one year the bag will still be sitting in the landfill very crushed by other pieces of other garbage. After one hundred years there will be very very small micro plastics that will seep into the ground underneath the landfill and the water way underneath. It would take more than 300-1000 years for a single plastic bag to fully decompose.

What happens to the food waste?

– It depends on which bin the food waste goes into. If the food waste goes into the garbage bin then it will just go into landfills and just pile up. For food to decompose, the food needs oxygen and when the garbage piles up the food might keep getting pushed down, where there is no oxygen and the food just rots in landfills, not decomposing until maybe years later. When food waste is put into the compost bin then it would be moved into proper compost bins with other food waste, dirt, and worms. The worms break down the food turning it into manure, then farmers can put the manure into their soil and it helps grow the crops.

How is food waste addressed in your house? What is one area you could personally improve in, regarding food waste?

– In my apartment there are multiple containers to seperate the waste where we put out garbage. Theres multiple bins for where we can put different cardboard boxes, theres one bin for glass, theres multiple bins for different types of plastic, theres 2 compost bins and one big trash bin. We regularly seperate our waste like this, but one area we could improve in is actually knowing which box belongs where. I cant tell the difference to i have to ask my mom and the bins need proper lableing because i sometimes put the wrong waste in the wrong bin.

Provide 3-4 suggestions for ways that consumers can decrease the amount of waste (both food and otherwise) we create.

1.Try to reduce the amount of food you eat out of packagings.

2. Learn how to use the recycling and compost bins

3. Learn how to make proper meals that are made out of fresh ingrediants instead of just eating microwavable food