The end of this aggravating, yet important journey
I learned a lot
My DOT project ended a couple of weeks ago, and let’s just say I didn’t do the best. During the beginning and middle, everything was going fine. I had only messed up once or twice, and I kept up with my DOT notes. But towards the end, I had messed up WAY more than I should’ve, and I had fallen behind on my notes. (Don’t worry I fixed the notes part).
Although I did not do the best at my experiment, I did manage to save quite a few pounds of meat. (211 yearly if I continued how I did to be exact.) I know, I’m surprised as well. Through my DOT project, I saved 116,258 gallons of water. (not including fish). Meat takes a LOT of useful water to produce, so just lowering the amount of meat you consume a week can be helpful to the environment. I also saved 564.32 pounds of carbon dioxide. ( again not including fish because I couldn’t find it.) Along with using a lot of useful water, meat produces a TON of carbon dioxide, as shown by the graph below.
Something that I have learned about myself through this DOT project is that it’s hard for me to change my way of living just over night. Especially when others around me were eating meat (my dad.) I think it has to do with the fact that I love meat so much and that I’m not used to not being able to eat it, which made this experiment so difficult for me. I also learned that not eating meat has taken a toll on my energy levels. For example at soccer practice and school (although I’m usually tired already), I noticed that I felt more sluggish . I don’t know if that’s due to no meat or if it’s just because I wasn’t sleeping enough, but nonetheless I was tired during this DOT project.
Although this experiment wasn’t my favorite, I am inspired to attempt (attempt is in bold for a reason) to tackle another project similar to this. I think that it is super important that we do as much as we can to help sustain our Earth for as long as possible. Just one small act can have a huge impact on our planet. From just walking more, or to composting every week, anything you can do that you might not think will have an impact, will have a great impact on our Earth.
