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.