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    Zero Waste: Simple Life Hacks to Drastically Reduce Your Trash
    Zero Waste: Simple Life Hacks to Drastically Reduce Your Trash
    Zero Waste: Simple Life Hacks to Drastically Reduce Your Trash
    Ebook225 pages1 hour

    Zero Waste: Simple Life Hacks to Drastically Reduce Your Trash

    By Shia Su

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Easy and Effective Strategies to Jumpstart a Sustainable, Waste-Free Lifestyle
    We have a worldwide trash epidemic. The average American disposes of 4.4 pounds of garbage per day, and our landfills hold 254 million tons of waste.
    What if there were a simple—and fun—way for you to make a difference? What if you could take charge of your own waste, reduce your carbon footprint, and make an individual impact on an already fragile environment?
    A zero waste lifestyle is the answer—and Shia Su is living it. Every single piece of unrecyclable garbage Shia has produced in one year fits into a mason jar—and if it seems overwhelming, it isn’t! In Zero Waste, Shia demystifies and simplifies the zero waste lifestyle for the beginner, sharing practical advice, quick solutions, and tips and tricks that will make trash-free living fun and meaningful. Learn how to:
  • Build your own zero waste kit
  • Prepare real food—the lazy way
  • Make your own DIY household cleaners and toiletries
  • Be zero waste even in the bathroom!
  • And more!

    • Be part of the solution! Implement these small changes at your own pace, and restructure your life to one of sustainable living for your community, your health, and the earth that sustains you.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSkyhorse
    Release dateApr 3, 2018
    ISBN9781510730823
    Zero Waste: Simple Life Hacks to Drastically Reduce Your Trash
    Author

    Shia Su

    Shia Su, as a first grader, was already of the opinion that pastries were packed in too many bags. Along with her husband, she began her zero waste journey in 2014. She documents her lifestyle on the blog Wasteland Rebel, providing readers with advice on trash reduction and living a sustainable life. She lives in Vancouver, Canada.

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    Reviews for Zero Waste

    4.5/5

    13 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Zero Waste offers non-judgmental ways to reduce our environmental impact. From new and old ways to store food, to processing our waste, to making clean personal care products, Shia Su provides ways we can individually start to live a more zero waste life.
    • 5/5
      This was great. The author has a fun writing style and lots of helpful tips and DIYs that you don’t always see on blogs.
    • 4/5
      Easy to read, practical ideas, well organised, gives the general understanding what zero waste is and what it means to be a part of it. Inspires to try out the given tips.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      I really liked this book. It was really helpful in detailing how to go zero waste. The author gave a great list of plastic free swaps for the kitchen.

      Problem is, sometimes throughout the book, she would write something but then not go into detail about it so now I have to look it up online. Example: she said that a lot of vegetables don’t need to be peeled so there will be less compost. I wish she would’ve mentioned which vegetables can be left unpeeled. Another example is when she talked about shopping zero waste. She explained what stuff to take with you and went into great detail about that, but I didn’t see her explain *how* to shop zero waste: how to get the tare of the jar, how to communicate with the cashier, etc. I feel like people who have no clue about zero waste will not like this book as much because it explains a lot of the *what*, but not the *how*. It was stuff like that that made me take off a star.

      I want to clarify that I really liked this book. It definitely filled in some gaps from other zero waste books. I just recommend reading other zero waste books to get the complete picture on going zero waste. I think Bea Johnson’s “Zero Waste Home” is a better book for absolute beginners. This book is better for people somewhat familiar with zero waste (maybe read a bit about it on the internet, articles, etc). I’m really glad I read this book and will recommend it to other people aspiring to become zero waste :)

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    Zero Waste - Shia Su

    INTRODUCTION

    ZERO WASTE LIVING—

    A MODERN REEMERGENCE

    OF AN OLD LIFESTYLE

    Many people find it hard to wrap their heads around how little trash my partner and I produce at home. No way, that’s unreal! is the most common reaction we get when people find out that our annual collection of nonrecyclable and plastic waste amounts to a quart jar.

    Well, we do not live completely zero waste, as our waste-stuffed jar proves. And yes, there is more: 6.5 pounds of paper waste, 0.2 pounds of metal waste such as bottle caps and staples, a dozen bottles and jars, and kitchen scraps (which we now compost in our kitchen after we finally gathered enough courage to give the rather unconventional idea of having worms as pets a try [see p. 155]). All this waste is recycled; our jar, on the other hand, contains nonrecyclable materials (plastic is recyclable in theory, but it mostly fails to be recycled for a wide range of reasons [see p. 150]).

    Whenever we talk to older folks, we get a very different reaction. They usually laugh out loud, saying to us youngsters: Oh, come on! Living waste-free is old news! At this point, they often start to give us practical advice: how to unclog the sink without all the chemical gimmicks, for example; and have we ever tried to just wrap our sandwich in a dish towel?

    As a matter of fact, only a few decades ago, everybody lived a zero waste lifestyle. Of course, nobody called it zero waste back then—it was just the normal way of life. We have only adapted a wasteful lifestyle very recently, and one can argue that this is not progress but rather a short-sighted high with a sudden crash that will be served with a side of regret.

    WE ARE COLLECTIVELY BLIND TO TRASH

    Trash has become such an integral and seemingly natural part of our daily lives that we never stop to think about it. We toss the empty shampoo bottle into the trash can. We bring out the trash. The moment the smelly bag leaves our home, it is out of sight, out of mind.

    Of course, we know that this trash does not simply vanish into thin air. We know about toxic landfills. Some of us already know that recycling isn’t as green as we would like to think—shipping recyclables across the globe is a common practice. We have heard about our oceans drowning in plastic. We are concerned that trash is disrupting the entire food chain and already found its way onto our plates.¹ But for some reason, none of that knowledge is at the forefront of our minds when we shop, grab a coffee, or are freeing an organic cucumber from its plastic shrink-wrap.

    According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the average American generated 1,620 pounds of garbage in 2014. This is a whopping 4.44 pounds per day! But what happens to all of it after it has been collected? In the US, only 34.6 percent is recycled, 12.8 percent is combusted for energy recovery, and the rest is landfilled.² As a comparison, several European countries like the Netherlands, Germany, or Sweden have already banned the practice of landfilling garbage.³

    Waste management facility.

    Around the globe, countless campaigns have been run to promote recycling. However, in the end, recycling only fights the symptoms, but not the cause, of our waste problem, especially since we often take recyclable labels as a permission to produce waste—It’s OK, it’s recyclable! Wouldn’t it be better not to trash the environment in the first place and only attempt to fix the damage afterward? Not to mention that what we commonly refer to as recycling is in fact often only down-cycling—the transformation of the original material into a lower quality product that is oftentimes no longer recyclable.

    If we are serious about counteracting climate change, the only way to make a difference is to reduce our impact on the environment and reframe our mind-set.

    It is not about recycling more. It is about wasting less.

    A ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE–KIND OF MISTAKE?

    As we all know too well, our economy is based on growth. This means we must consume more and more in order to keep hitting those growth expectations that signal a healthy economy. And we do a pretty good job at keeping up. We continue buying things, even though we already have an abundance of stuff at home, stuff that is much more than we need or could ever use. If everyone on this planet consumed as much as the average US citizen, we would need four earths to sustain us!

    Too bad we only have this one planet with only a limited amount of resources. Unlimited growth is simply impossible to sustain in the long term, yet it is a system by which we still operate. I argue that a system based on unlimited growth was set up to fail from the very beginning. I like to call it a zombie apocalypse–kind of mistake—a thoughtless error with a fatal outcome.

    Things need to change, whether we accept the facts or not. Some economists call for a focus on qualitative instead of quantitative growth, while degrowth theorists envision alternative social structures to achieve economic equality with the limited resources available to us. They plead for better instead of more.

    We do not like to hear that the party is over—especially when we are privileged enough to live in a rich society.

    —Harald Welzer, social psychologist, Europa-Universität Flensburg⁴

    Moreover, satisfying our greed for faster, cheaper, and newer does not even seem to make us happy! In fact, the national happiness in the US peaked sometime in the 1950s,⁵ i.e., it only went downhill from then on. What is for sure is the fact that our hunger for more results in misery on the other side of the globe, where laborers (some of them children) are exploited to satisfy our cravings for fast fashion and cheap commodities.

    Zero waste is about reducing waste first and foremost. However, when you start to minimize the trash you create, one side effect is you will automatically begin to buy less; you will also buy more consciously, focusing on what truly makes you happy, rather than a quick high. You’ll start to focus on better instead of more.

    Designed to be trashed.

    Remember: the natural resources available to us are limited and running low. Yet we are treating them like income instead of irreplaceable capital, as economist E. F. Schumacher pointed out in 1975.⁶ We are wasting an enormous amount of scarce and limited resources like fossil fuel on producing disposable plastic items. Isn’t it crazy how we are wasting our dwindling resources on things designed to go directly into the trash after one use?

    Furthermore, as packaging and single-use items are designed to only be utilized once, they need to be cheap. To cut costs, they must be produced inexpensively. This is only achievable by externalizing the cost, which in turn means that the workers and the environment pay for the low prices. Once-valuable resources are often converted to toxic waste, which finds its way back to us by entering the food chain (e.g., microplastics) or by polluting our groundwater. Ultimately, we are also paying for the cheap price tags with our health.

    BE PART OF THE SOLUTION, NOT THE PROBLEM

    Personally, I have grown so tired of the blame game. The industry blames the consumer for only accepting perfect goods at ridiculously low prices, preventing them from offering more sustainable options. At the same time, consumers say it is the industry that makes large-scale decisions, so, duh, it is the industry that needs to change first.

    It is a ping-pong game without a winner, and no one takes responsibility. It is easy to feel overwhelmed, to feel that you are only one in a million who cannot make large-scale decisions. I cannot pass any laws, nor am I the CEO of a big corporation. But does this make me powerless? It does not. I for one might not be able to have a direct influence on the upstream waste created in the production and transportation processes. However, I can set an example by refusing waste at the level of the consumer.

    To me, being zero waste means

    starting with myself and what

    I have direct control over.

    I realized I have full

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