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You might have seen pictures like this around the web. That jar full of trash has become the symbol of the Zero Waste movement, and the person holding it is Lauren Singer, one of the influencers that contributed to making the movement as popular as it is now. How? Well, many people — myself included — first heard of the movement thanks to the many videos and articles about her story: that jar filled with trash is the only garbage she produced during four years of living a zero waste lifestyle.
Picturing a year worth of trash in a jar is kind of crazy but it’s also a great marketing move, and it’s what made the movement spread so quickly. And while I actually kind of admire people who can achieve that, is going zero waste the best thing to do in the first place?
How Zero Waste works
At its core, zero waste is an individual consumer-side solution with the goal of sending as little to landfill as possible. It seeks to tackle the growing issue of waste by minimizing the number of materials people create that eventually end up in landfills and recycling centers. The practitioners of this movement are experts in refusing, reusing, and recycling, because the last one alone isn’t enough in a world where only 9% of plastic waste gets recycled.
Google searches for zero waste have tripled since 2017, and there are roughly 3 million posts about this on Instagram. It’s no surprise that this lifestyle was born in the era of climate change. Plastic pollution is soon going to become a hot topic, as the consequences it has already had will only be enlarged by the pandemic that forced us to turn on disposable cups and masks.
The problem
The problem is that even if you managed to not produce waste at all and came out with an empty jar, your total impact would still never be zero. Our actions and lifestyles will always carry a magnitude of environmental consequences: even for zero waste folks, the impact is still there, it’s just been shifted onto the manufacturing side of the chain. Bulk items still require packaging and cause fuel emissions, plus they pollute when stored, shipped and contained.
It doesn’t matter if you buy your fruit without plastic wrap and plastic bags if the fruit was wrapped during transportation: just because you don’t see the trash, it doesn’t mean it’s not there. The chain of warehouses every product goes through to reach the store do have an impact, whether it is in the form of gas emissions or plastic waste.
The problem of zero waste is exactly that: it is based on the idea of minimizing and eliminating only the visible waste, just the one that we have immediate control of. That’s not to say it’s bad, don’t get me wrong. Those who can actually manage to do that are actually reaching their goal and doing something good. It’s just that, looking from the outside, zero waste seems a bit like “out of sight, out of mind”.
It’s also forgetting the other type of impact reusable products have: reusable coffee cups need to be used up to 1000 times to make up for the impact of a single cardboard one, cotton bags used for grocery shopping are responsible for 131 times the carbon footprint of a single plastic bag.
The even bigger problem: cost and opportunity
But even with the best intentions, zero waste is not a practically viable solution for many. I live in Milan, the most green-minded and forward thinking city of the country (Italy), but even here finding shops that allow zero waste shopping is impossible. There are some workarounds, such as buying directly at farmers market, but many alternatives to plastic-wrapped products do come at a steeper price and not everyone can afford them. And I’m sure there are many people like me with the feeling that eliminating all garbage produced is basically unachievable. Many can’t afford reusable items to replace plastic, or — even worse — they can’t replace some for hygenic and medical reasons (let’s not forget eco-ableism).
Essentially, going zero waste requires ample time, effort and money. But don’t get me wrong, this is not the fault of the movement itself. In fact they have done an amazing job in spotlighting our excessive relationship with waste. Going zero waste is hard because our economies have been built on the idea that single use plastic is good and without consequences, not because there aren’t enough shops to support this lifestyle.
What discourages many from even attempting is not the set of strict rules the movement has, it’s just the fact that everything is wrapped in plastic nowadays. As one of the founders of the movement (Bea Johnson) once put it:
It’s difficult, because you’re a human being, and trash is just around. It happens. It’s this interesting intersection of like, ‘Oh damn, the world is ending and there’s so much plastic everywhere,’ but at the same time we’re just trying to be people in bodies living our lives.
But are there any viable alternatives?
Individual consumers certainly didn’t cause climate change, but we can still solve it nonetheless. How? With our money, because big corporations always respond when people stop buying their products.
But by that I don’t mean that we should do it one by one, individually, as the zero waste movement suggests. The goal of zero waste should be to bring more people in, to raise awareness and help consumers develop a better relationship with their waste, not to aim for perfection in waste reduction.
A better practical solution would be to go to the source of the trash itself: in addition to eliminating some packaging from our lives, we should perhaps reach out or work with companies and stores to minimize the unnecessary packaging. Even getting just one shop to reduce the trash they produce would have a much bigger impact than one person going zero waste. In the long run, we would be able to reach much bigger economies of scale this way.
Because while zero waste does indeed reduce the impact of our lives on the planet, we could potentially create greater environmental change by addressing bigger issues. Even just raising awareness and petitioning could go a long way.
Zero waste has done a lot in terms of raising awareness on the topic, but we need to do more if we actually want to change things in a bigger way. Unity is strength, and an individual approach just isn’t going to make it in the long run.
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Previously published on Medium.com and is republished here under permission.
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Photo credit: Lauren Singer holding her trash jar // AP Photo
