Some people will do anything to prove a point. One man decided he wanted to show others what our trash is doing to the planet. So he wore his trash for 30 days.
Rob Greenfield is a 35-year-old environmentalist who has done some interesting things. He rode “a bamboo bike across the country with no money, lived in a 100 square foot, solar-powered “tiny house” he built out of repurposed material, and has eaten [nothing but] food he grew and foraged himself,” reports People.
This time, hoping to show people how much trash we produce each day, he decided to wear a trash suit in Los Angeles and fill it with all the trash he produced each day. By the end of the month, his suit weighed in at 72 pounds.
That guy isn’t that impressed.
Greenfield ended up “only” stuffing two and a half pounds of trash into his suit each day. By comparison, the EPA says the average American throws out about five pounds of trash every day, or 1825 pounds per year. And that’s just one of us. “So just imagine creating one ton of garbage per year, and now imagine 10 years, and now imagine a lifetime,” Greenfield says. “Basically, each of us can leave behind a small mountain of trash for future generation (sic).”
Greenfield describes his experiment:
“To create a visual example of waste and not be smelly,” he says he “swapped raw food waste with the equivalent amount of dry rice,” People said. “I would catch myself in the reflection of windows sometimes, and all I could say was, ‘This is absolutely ridiculous.'”
But he wasn’t referring to his experiment, he was referring to the amount of trash Americans produce in a month. “I wanted people to look at this and say, ‘Wow, is that what my trash suit would look like if I had to wear all my trash for a month? Is that how much trash I create?'”
It really does make a point, when you see the visual.
When Greenfield was 25 he was on his way to becoming a millionaire with a successful marketing company. But in 2011, after considering his consumerism, “he dissolved his company, gave away most of his possessions and lives a minimalistic, environmentally friendly life below the poverty line. Now, he’s spent the last 10 years spreading his message of sustainability, food independence, conserving water, transitioning to renewable energy sources and zero-waste living,” said People.
A Japanese man spent over $15,000 to transform himself into a dog! You need to see this!
Well, it’s definitely not for everyone. Some people enjoy the finer things in life, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s good that people are out there who are willing to go the extra mile to prove a point. What do you think about his experiment?
