We all have our own story of how our awareness grew around the negative impacts of the waste we produce and how our desire for change came about. Perhaps you were lucky enough to have been raised living Zero Waste, or perhaps you have recently in adulthood commenced your Zero Waste journey. Wherever we are at, it’s important to encourage each other with kindness and share ideas.
Perhaps some of you can relate to how I came to change some of my wasteful ways…..
Childhood
I grew up with an appreciation for and love of nature and understood the importance of caring for it. As a child, I knew how to compost, separate our rubbish for recycling, landfill, or green waste, and we generally didn’t consume/own large amounts of unnecessary items. However, that was where the efforts ended. Like many others did and still do, we sent single-use items off to landfill, used plastic cling-wrap to cover food and for many years used plastic bags to collect groceries and fruit and vegetables. When I moved out of the family home and into my own, I promptly set up a compost bin, put a ‘no junk mail’ sticker on the mailbox, gave myself a pat on the back and continued my ‘environmentally friendly’ ways.
Having children
After having two children, I became increasingly aware of the waste we were generating. We were just one average family trying to do what we could to not be wasteful and separate our rubbish, yet we were still generating an 80L bin of landfill each week and a 240L bin of recycling every fortnight. The scale of what was being generated across the community, and indeed the planet, started to concern me.
Perhaps it was having children and the desire for sustainability for the next generation on my mind. Perhaps it was the tide of ‘things’ that seemed to endlessly flow into our house after having children (well-meaning gifts, samples, things we bought that we thought we needed for a baby or toddler) and my increasing resentment for the amount of my time that their management required. I cannot say exactly what the catalyst was, but there was a growing awareness and many lightbulb moments that were about to lead to positive change.
In one of my ‘lightbulb’ moments, I was standing in my laundry and staring at the giant empty plastic tub of ‘Earth-friendly’ laundry liquid wondering if it really gets recycled when I put it in the recycle bin and what energy and resources are required to generate and then recycle this tub? What pollutants are released into the environment in these processes? This is just one tub, one person, one laundry. How could this product possibly be ‘Earth-friendly’? How is this ok? The questions and concerns around the impact of our consumer-driven and waste-producing society were reeling in my head, but growing was the firm belief that there. Must. Be. A. Better. Way.
The world of Zero Waste
I started looking into ways to reduce waste and – wow – a whole new world opened up! The world of Zero Waste. There were many items in the home I simply didn’t need (a cupboard full of various cleaning products and plastic cling film for example), so many disposable products that could be replaced with more sustainable alternatives (bye-bye single-use tampons and menstrual pads, sayonara plastic produce bags!) and alternatives at the shops and surrounds (filling my own reusable jar with popping corn? Yes please! Using olive oil as a night moisturiser for amazing skin? Bring it on!).
The two biggest game-changers for me were purchasing Bea Johnson’s book “Zero Waste Home” and discovering local bulk food stores that I had previously not known existed.
Now
Although I’ve been making changes for around four years now, I still have a long way to go, have a lot to learn and am very much on the Zero Waste journey myself. I am far from eliminating plastic waste in my life, but I have reduced our family’s waste dramatically* and I’m keen to continue to find ways to reduce my waste, including my recycling.
Change to Zero
Starting ‘Change to Zero’ has been bubbling away in my mind for a while, spurred on by the desire to raise awareness and start conversations about reducing household waste and living more environmentally friendly in the day-to-day. We can make a big impact by some pretty simple changes and there is so much we can do right now!
So many of us buy wasteful things that we don’t need because they are in the mainstream; they are at the shops in front of us and we see many others purchasing them, so we do so without thought. If more people start Zero Waste living and make positive changes, awareness will increase and the change to more sustainable living will accellerate. I hope to be one voice of many that contributes to the switch to Zero Waste living.
For what it’s worth
Zero Waste living has brought meaning and an enjoyable simplicity to my life. I have gained more time for the important things, and saved money. And, it doesn’t cost anything; nothing needs to be sacrificed. To quote Bea Johnson in her book Zero Waste Home, “Zero Waste does not deprive; on the contrary, through Zero Waste, I have found a sense of meaning and purpose. My life has been transformed – it’s based on experiences rather than stuff, based on embracing change rather than hiding in denial”. I have found this to be my experience also.
*Our 80L weekly red bin has gone from ~100% full to ~20% full most weeks and we produce none to very little waste when we are out and about as we tend to go completely zero when we are out or bring any small amounts of waste home to sort. We are still working on the recycling and that is a little harder to measure as that fluctuated fortnight to fortnight a little anyway, but it is dropping. I’ve got some more work to do!
Change to Zero 