This evening we had a wonderful meal of macaroni and cheese with tuna fish, plus I harvested some oysters from the intertidal zone in front of our campsite and grilled them over the fire. After eating them I tossed there charred shells on a huge midden near our campsite. For thousands of years the native people of the Pacific Northwest have been eating oysters and piling the shells up to form middens, which are basically their trash piles. However, the only “trash” that was produced from their oyster meals were charred oyster shells like the ones that I added to the pile.

The waste from the rest of our meal consisted of two metal tuna cans, a large zip-lock bag, and 4 foil pouches. Dealing with modern garbage is not as simple as dealing with the oyster shells. We certainly do not what to just through our garbage on the ground, but we are not sure what we should do with it. Plus, we need to find ways to reduce the amount of garbage that we produce.

We are hoping that you can help us come up with ways we can reduce the amount of garbage that we produce and help us decide what we should do with our garbage.

We also want to know what you can do to reduce the amount of garbage you produce.

Response to last week’s dilemma:

Thank you for providing us with so many great ideas for how we should structure our water quality sampling. We have decided to collect our samples where ever we are at 10 AM each morning, and it we are collecting more than one sample in a day the we will collect samples every other hour starting at 10 AM.