Chapter 5: Less Stuff: The Zero Waste Challenge

INSPIRATION

Dick and Jeanne Roy are an all-American couple. Dick Roy was president of his class at Oregon State University, an officer in the navy, and a corporate lawyer with a prestigious law firm in Portland. Jeanne worked as an activist on air quality and solid waste issues, contributing to the development of Portland’s excellent recycling programs. In 1993, the Roys started the Northwest Earth Institute, an organization devoted to helping people move towards sustainable lifestyles. In an entire year, the Roys produce one regular sized can of garbage.

Colin Beavan, better known as No Impact Man, lives in New York City with his wife, daughter, and dog. No Impact Man has garnered international attention for his effort to minimize his ecological footprint. Beavan and his family buy nothing new, use no fossil-fuel-powered transportation, eat only local food, and use no packaging or plastic. Recognizing that having absolutely no impact defies the laws of physics, they are attempting to offset their negative environmental impacts with positive actions, including planting trees, cleaning up beaches, and composting.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

We’ve already addressed the three categories that contribute to 80% of the ecological footprint of people living in industrialized countries—housing, food, and transport. As for the remaining 20% of your footprint, there are countless products and activities that contribute but none that make up a particularly large slice of the pie. A single Wal-Mart store carries more than one hundred thousand different products. Going through each possible category would make this book so long it would take up an environmentally disastrous number of pages and be unreadable. As well, because products change so quickly and so many new businesses, goods, and services enter the market every year, specific advice tends to become out of date quickly.

Instead, we recommend six general ways you can move towards achieving zero waste:

1. Following principles of sustainable consumption.
2. Reducing your consumption.
3. Reusing items when possible.
4. Repairing items when possible.
5. Recycling when possible.
6. Composting your kitchen, lawn, and garden waste.

TWELVE GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF SUSTAINABLE CONSUMPTION

1. Remember the big picture. Spend less time worrying about plastic bags and disposable cups and more time thinking about where you live, energy use in your home, how often and how far you drive (and fly), and what you eat.
2. Don’t buy stuff that you don’t need. Among the three environmental commandments—reduce, reuse, and recycle—reduce is by far the most important. It is obvious that the planet cannot sustain 6.6 billion people consuming at the rate of North Americans or Australians, let alone the 9 billion people expected to be here by 2050.
3. Make food, not waste. Before you buy something, think ahead to when you’ll stop using it. Every product, when you’re finished with it, should be food for either the biological economy (readily biodegradable materials) or the industrial economy (recyclable or reusable raw materials for new products). If a product is a combination of both, then it should be capable of being easily separated or disassembled.
4. Buy local. The closer to home a product is grown, built, or made, generally the lower the transportation costs and associated pollution. You can also have greater confidence that local production methods will be safe for human health and the environment, as suggested by the spate of recent problems with imports from China.
5. Go for quality, not quantity. Select durable products and maximize their reuse through regular maintenance and care. Keep products such as clothing, sporting equipment, and kitchen goods in circulation through thrift stores and charities. Choose products certified as ecologically and socially responsible by an independent organization. (See “Certification,” below.)
6. Support renewable energy. Seek out products and businesses that rely on wind, solar, geothermal, or other renewable sources of power.
7. Make healthy choices. Avoid purchasing or using toxic and hazardous products. Sometimes the danger is obvious—the product’s label says “Warning,” “Poison,” “Toxic,” “Flammable,” or “Explosive.” In the absence of these warning signs, watch out for long chemical names in the list of ingredients on a product. Chemicals that you never heard of or can’t pronounce are prime candidates for suspicion about negative health and environmental effects. (See “Label-reading 101,” below.)
8. Look for a high proportion of recycled content. To fulfill the promise of recycling requires people to purchase recycled products. Sometimes you do this unintentionally, like when you buy aluminum cans or appliances made with recycled steel. Other times, the onus is on you to seek out products made from recycled materials, such as school or office supplies.
9. Demand better options. Green choices should be easy to find and affordable, but misguided laws and policies often favor unsustainable products. Individual actions can only go so far, and need to be complemented by strong, pro-environment public policies. The more people vote for environmentally informed candidates, speak up on behalf of innovative green solutions, and push for change, the sooner the shift towards a sustainable future will come about. (See Chapter 6, Citizen Green.)
10. Encourage environmental leaders and innovators. Eco-entrepreneurs and green companies often face competitive disadvantages because quality materials and clean products have higher prices (even if their long-term or overall costs are lower). Be a leader yourself and give them your support.
11. Clean up your mental environment. To start reducing the constant stream of commercial messages urging you to buy more stuff, try watching less television, canceling subscriptions to catalogs, and limiting your Internet use. Protecting children is especially vital. Between 1980 and 2004, the amount spent on advertising that directly targets American children rose from $100 million per year to $15 billion. Children now see an average of forty thousand television commercials per year. Push your government to copy Sweden, the U.K., and Quebec, where certain types of advertising aimed at kids are prohibited.
12. Trade money for time. This may be the best deal you ever make, the personal equivalent of the U.S. buying Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million in 1867 (less than two cents per acre). People in Canada and the U.S. feel more stressed than ever before, and bemoan the fact that there’s so little free time in their lives. This isn’t surprising, considering the fact that Americans work about 350 hours per year (ten weeks) more than Europeans.

In addition, do what you can to avoid using high-impact products (including gasoline-powered lawnmowers, leafblowers, and snowblowers; tobacco; pesticides and fertilizers; and hazardous cleaners and paints). And if possible, don’t participate in high-impact activities:

• Powerboating
• Jet skiing
• Snowmobiling
• Recreational off-road driving
• Fishing
• Golfing

By avoiding high-impact products and activities, and by following principles of sustainable consumption, you’ll be able to progress towards the goal of zero waste. These principles apply to just about every imaginable category of goods and services that you may contemplate purchasing—clothing, carpets, toys, furniture, paint, cleaners, appliances, electronics, cosmetics, sporting equipment. Take clothing as an example.

Applying the twelve guiding principles means thinking about whether you really need more T-shirts or shoes, checking out vintage (secondhand) clothing stores, focusing on natural (and ideally organic) fibers such as wool, hemp, bamboo (you’ll be amazed how soft it is), Tencel (made from the cellulose in wood pulp), and cotton, striving to buy from local designers and producers, and reducing clutter by donating your used clothing to charities.

Label-reading 101

Since green is the new black, it’s trendy for manufacturers and retailers to claim that their products are environmentally friendly. How do you know if their claims are accurate or if they’re greenwash? First, check for certification by a respected organization. Second, be skeptical about vague claims. Words such as “natural,” “green,” and “safe” can mean just about anything and are widely misused. Third, look for specific details. The three green arrows symbol and the word “recycle” or “recyclable” mean that a product is recyclable but not that it is made of recycled content. If the label says “recycled,” look for how much of the content is recycled. There’s a big difference between 5% and 100%. Fourth, context is important. A “recyclable” product won’t be recycled unless it’s included in your community program. A “biodegradable” product will not biodegrade if you put it in the garbage, since even food and paper may not break down in landfills. You can get full details on all of the various claims made on product labels from Consumer Reports at www.greenerchoices.org.