Trash Diaries Activity

This simple activity is designed to teach students how human behavior creates materials that can be studied later. They will examine each other’s own trash to see how their specific activities resulted in different “deposits.”

Materials

• Paper and pencils

Directions

• Over the course of a weekend or week, have students record all of the trash that they or their family/household throws out or recycles.

• Record only non-organic and non-paper materials (e.g., drink bottles, plastic food packaging, old shoes, lotion bottles, etc.) that wouldn’t disintegrate over time - in other words, items that could be found by future archaeologists!

• Record both object type and the quantity.

• At the end of the recording period, have the students swap diaries with one another and answer discussion questions about inferences that can be made from the records.

• After inferences are made, swap back to see how accurate their findings are.

Sample Discussion Questions

• Can you tell the gender, age, or social status of the individual(s) that deposited the trash?

• Are there items only used at certain times of the year? (e.g., sunscreen bottles and popsicle

wrappers in the summer or flower potting containers in the spring)

• Were there items related to a specific event or celebration? (e.g., broken Christmas lights)

• Were large quantities of items thrown out together, possibly from a large cleaning episode or move?

• Can you estimate how many people the items represent?

• Consider that this only tells us about what people are throwing away, and it doesn’t show

everything that people are using. What items were maybe not recorded? Why might they not have thrown out?

• How do the diaries differ or are similar? What commonalities can be found between

people/households?