Gum

Today was a pretty good day packaging wise. I woke up and I ate some food in the UC that only comes in boxes, which are recycled and have no plastic wrap. Later in the day though I absent-mindedly started chewing some gum.  I got to thinking about gum. Not only does it come in a ridiculous amount of packaging for how small it is, but it also doesn't meet any of my needs calories wise. That is pretty bad in and of itself, but then as I was spitting it out I realized something else, gum just becomes waste. I was curious so I did a bit of research about gum, and it actually does not biodegrade and is becoming a huge problem world wide. It never goes away, is very difficult to clean up once it sticks to the ground, and it is becoming a health hazard for animals. To me it seems like one of the most wasteful products ever, but I have really never even thought about whether or not I should eat gum because it is such a normal thing to do. I feel like this is everybody's experience with waste, they put it in the garbage can and then it instantly disappears from their lives and it no long affects them in any way. On a practical level this seems true enough, but I feel like we don't quite have unlimmited space to put all of our stuff no matter how optomistic we are. It is also an enviornmental concern that does have an affect on all of us, but like most enviornmental concerns it is hard to get people motivated about unless it affects them in a meaningful way at the moment.

Anyways after the gum incident the next time I ate was at Jack in the Box. Bad decision as the burger came wrapped in paper. Not a huge amount of packaging but enough for me to remember never to eat fastfood. Obviously no drink because that took a lot more packaging. I also left the tray at the front because it had paper on it and I told the cashier he should use it on someone else. He seemed to think that was a bit weird, but he didn't protest. All in all though this was a fairly successful day, where I discovered a bit of waste in the fast food industry and a lot of inherent waste in chewing gum.