People Cuddled Next to 7 Days Worth of Trash Will Change How You Look at Food Waste [PHOTOS]

The life of an average piece of trash harbors the most fleeting of emotions. You walk through the grocery aisle and something catches your eye. An attractive, colorful box of cookies that warms your heart with familiarity. You take it home, open it up and finish it off with a cold glass of milk. Satisfied and content, you throw the empty box that once evoked such nostalgic emotions into the trash. Without a ounce of remorse.

Now multiply this to several times a day, hundreds of times a week. This flow of affection to indifference, resulting in forgotten piles of leftovers and crumpled packaging. Seeking to capture the remnants of our actions — trash — photographer Gregg Segal created an ongoing series named 7 Days of Garbage.

7 Days of Garbage is a series of portraits of friends, neighbors, and other acquaintances with the garbage they accumulate in the course of a week. Subjects are photographed surrounded by their trash in a setting that is part nest, part archeological record. We’ve made our bed and in it we lie.

Like he said, we’ve made our bed.

Art by Gregg Segal