Look around you — on the street corner, in the Fishbowl, in your kitchen. Waste is all around us. It can be viewed as involuntary and unconscious, as Adrianna Bojrab described in her article “Commit to reducing waste” in the Oct. 21 edition of The Michigan Daily. But at the same time, I would also argue that waste is entirely voluntary. The mere existence of waste and trash points to a choice that we as a society are making. Since it's easy to buy into the status quo, we trick ourselves into thinking there is no choice.

Since March 29, 2010, I have been trying to live a trash-free life. I consider everything except toilet paper and food scraps as trash — that means recyclables are trash, too. I use bags and containers that I owned on March 29 as my only transporting and packaging materials. If I do “need” something, I only buy it from a second-hand store. I refuse before reducing, reusing or recycling.

I realized quickly that most of our trash on a daily basis comes from food packaging, and that buying groceries, flour, fruit and beans in bulk will save much trash from ending up in landfills. I shop at the Farmer's Market and the People's Food Co-op almost exclusively. I carry around a set of silverware and ask the server at BTB not to wrap my burritos in foil. Since March 29, I have accumulated around 3 pounds of trash, mostly receipts, the tops of reusable milk jars and stickers off of fruit.

There are, however, other things that I failed to anticipate, such as a broken Pyrex pie dish, and a sparkler from my friend’s graduation party. Each piece of trash I now have has a story for me. Each piece embodies an experience and many lives. Not only mine, but also those of the human and natural resources that went into making them.

I grew up in Mumbai, India, a bustling, multicultural, multilingual city of close to 20 million people. Just like any megacity, the grime there is visible, tangible and never more than a few feet away from you. Yet, I grew up there during a time in which over-consumption hadn't really made its way into the mainstream Indian culture. I am proud to say my parents afforded my sister and me a simple but incredibly happy life, without the truly unnecessary trinkets and gadgets that seem to clutter homes and trash cans nowadays.

After moving to Ann Arbor in 2003 to start an undergraduate degree, nothing much changed for me in the way I chose to live. Living within means and constraints — personal, financial, social and environmental — is something I value. I believe this is the responsible way to live. My first laptop from 2003 is still the same one I use today; it gets the job done. The clothes I wear, as old as they may be, keep me covered, warm and comfortable. New things always come with their tags, bubble wrap and fancy bags — things we will “trash” within days.

When I go to a second-hand store, I choose not to see "old" forks, "reused" t-shirts and "outdated" furniture. Instead, I choose to see all the material, energy, water, time and other resources we have invested in perfectly functional and working objects, objects of our humanity. I don't mean to say that there isn't merit in novelty and fashion. What I am saying is that we should make full use of what we have already, before going out and purchasing something new, untouched and virgin.

Trash is visceral — we feel trash, we smell it, touch it and hear it. When we go out to dinner, we use napkins to wipe our hands. When we crack open a bottle of wine, we rip off the wrapping, hiding the cork and throwing it out. On game day, the yard of a college fraternity house is littered with plastic cups. We hear the early trash collectors with their huge trucks at the crack of dawn, crushing pounds of trash. A trash bin filled to the brim releases a putrid smell that just makes us want to walk away.

Indeed, trash makes its presence felt far more than do our other foes, like greenhouse gases.