What would turn up in your trash that woud give you away. I think if you thought about it you’d be suprised at how much info someone could gain about you just by tearing through your weekly trash.
My family;
Found; Lots of empty juice boxes, yogurt containers (the stuff for kids) and cat litter refuse.
Deduced; Lots of kids, and cats. Probably like three of one and four of the other.
Found; Two empty bags from Chipotle, buried in different layers.
Deduced; Eats fast food once or twice a week but not the fried stuff. And not on the same day. Most likely Chipotle, since that’s where the bags are from.
Found; Empty Grape Nuts box, empty Cheerios box.
Deduced; The kids eat Cheerios and the adults eat Grape Nuts.
Found; Lots of junk mail - unopened. Majority of the credit card application type.
Deduced; Probably has good credit, doesn’t need more credit cards.
Found; Dozen egg shells, potatoe peelings, and empty waffle box in single layer of trash.
Deduced; Probably likes to make a large breakfast on the weekend which includes eggs, potatoes, and waffles.
Enough for now, I’ll think of more later.
That’s the idea. Don’t get too specific. Don’t want the Weirdos actually tracking you down.
You’d find out I love coffee, cereal, do a lot of academic research, read Entertainment Weekly*, eat instant pasta and, depending on the week, enjoy whiskey, rum or beer.
*I read a lot of other magazines as well, but these are most likely to end up in the trash.
Right now… you’d find a pile of my husbands shaved hair, from the top of his head, mostly. And an empty bottle of Drano. I’ll let you do the deducing. It will probably be right.
Other than that, there are smaller, neatly tied up bags of cat litter, Canadian candy bar wrappers, various fruit rinds/cores, an empty box of Borax, an empty Mr. Clean with orange bottle, and some birthday wrapping paper.
Deduction: Household with cats, people who like sweet things and at least one of them is from Canada, like to be clean, and just had a birthday. (yeah, I did, a couple weeks ago, but my grandmother’s package just arrived today.)
Ok…I’ll use the garbage can next to my desk here as a case study:
Item: Several dozen empty cans of Pepsi One (recycling bucket). Conclusion: That I subsist solely on Pepsi One. Accuracy of Conclusion: Yup, I do.
Item: Empty packaging from a four-pack of energy-efficient seven-year light bulbs. Conclusion: That I just switched several bulbs over to the energy-efficient ones. Accuracy of Conclusion: No, I’ve been replacing them one at a time as the old ones burned out. Just had #4 burn out today.
Item: Junk mail – Sports Illustrated subscription offer. Conclusion: Doesn’t want an SI subscription, may not like sports. Accuracy of Conclusion: Semi. Love football and basketball, but don’t want to subscribe when I’d only read it half of the year. Read SI online instead.
Item: Several small styrofoam bowls with milk and cereal residue. Same number of plastic spoons. Conclusion: Eats Frosted Mini-Wheats for breakfast almost daily. Shits on the enviroment. Accuracy of Conclusion: Bingo.
Hmmm… well, if you snooped through my trash from this past weekend*, you’d think:
I drink waaaaaaaaaay to much.
I got married.
Damn! How much chicken can one person eat in a week!
*My neighbors celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary by renewing their wedding vows in a ceremony in their back yard. They had a big wedding cake, a bbq that featured chicken, and a lot of booze and beer. They put their overflow trash in my trash cans.
See, trash can be deceiving!
Doesn’t recycle
Drinks way too much Diet Pepsi Twist
Buys strawberries and lets them rot
Not much of an alcohol drinker
Shreads colorful documents…what the hell?
( Explanation: I color-code my worksheets on reported patient data at the hospital with pretty highlighters to keep me at-a-glance caught up, but these being a HUGE personal privacy/HIPPA violation if even accidentally made public, any that hitch-hike home in my pocket get shredded on the instant of their discovery.)
You’d find out how many bananas and how much coffee I put away in just a week; that I use paper plates; that I go through an astonishing amount of kleenex.
I also recycle a lot of stuff, but we’re sticking to garbage here, I think.
In the recycling bin there is currently six empty bottles of booze and assorted crushed cans of beer.
One would think there be a lot of drinking going on, when in reality, I save the empty bottles until I replace them so I know what to get (or not get, if I didn’t like it) the next time I make a booze run. Made a booze run over the weekend so the bin is full of empty bottles. I’m sure the regular garbage pickup is aware of the children situation in the household (last year the garbage was half diapers) so the empty bottles of booze probably didn’t shock him too much.
Also, one of us drinks a lot of energy type drinks. An amazing amount, in fact. Enough to push the warning limit on the can, - Yikes.
Something that would have startled someone digging through the garbage last winter was a completly intact dead chicken. Feathers and all.
Also, another family that wastes produce. In the last week I pitched bag of broccoli, half bag of lettuce, and some rhubarb stalks. A questionable containter of curdled sour cream (neither of us could remember bying any in the last month or so) and cooked noodles of dubious odor.
Congratulations, although I didn’t think that it was legal in your neck of the woods.
In our trash can? You wouldn’t find much of anything interesting. You’d find that we frequently use generic products over name brand, I suppose, and that my father got some shoes for Fathers’ Day.
If you weren’t careful about your timing, you might find out that our neighbors, with whom we share a recepticle, are a) armed and b) fond of their privacy. If you were lucky, however, you’d find out that we eat very little meat, that we recycle, that except for ketchup we don’t care much about brand names, that we shred pretty much all the trash with any information more personal than “Dear Occupant” into confetti, and that somebody in the house smokes. Also that we like onions a lot.
