Trash jars are trending. Plastic-free is popping. Reusables are all the rage. Even composting is downright cosmopolitan.
The zero waste movement has got a lot of press, but what is zero waste and are these lifestyle choices having an impact?
Quite simply, living zero waste means sending nothing to the landfill. Zip. Zilch. Zero.
Of course, the real answer is far more complex than plastic = bad, because it involves a redefinition of how we see our resources flow into waste and back again and living completely zero waste is pretty impossible.
Making simple habit changes like washing your counters with a reusable cloth may not feel life-changing. Maybe you’re not sure you’re having an actual impact?
Take a deep breath. Give yourself a pat on the back. The signs are good.
Since the early days of zero waste, with legends like Bea Johnson pioneering the movement, and then David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II and, of course, the terrifying movie A Plastic Ocean, the world has embraced many of the concepts championed by the zero waste movement.
Here, we define zero waste in a bit more depth and cover a brief history of the movement, its impact, and where it’s headed. If you’re looking for more hands on guides to changing your lifestyle, try this instead: zero waste tips.
And if you’re feeling a little disheartened by the whole thing, have a watch of our video on the topic:
Contents: Zero Waste
- Defining Zero Waste Jump to section
- What Is The Zero Waste Movement? Jump to section
- Getting Practical: How Individuals Contribute To "Zero Waste" Jump to section
- The Bigger Picture: Zero Waste As A Systemic Concept Jump to section
- The Impact Of The Zero Waste Movement Jump to section
- Where Is the Zero Waste Movement Heading? The Future Is Circular Jump to section
Defining Zero Waste
Today, the most common, internationally accepted definition of zero waste is that by the Zero Waste International Alliance:
“The conservation of all resources by means of responsible production, consumption, reuse, and recovery of products, packaging, and materials without burning and with no discharges to land, water, or air that threaten the environment or human health.”
What Is The Zero Waste Movement?
Low-waste living isn’t a new concept.
Before the disposable era, repairing, reusing, and repurposing items was the norm. Milk was delivered in glass bottles that were returned and reused, clothes were repaired and handed down, and cloth nappies were standard. We’re pretty sure previous generations would have been (and are) shocked by the vast amounts of single-use plastic that began to enter the world from the 1950s onwards.
The zero waste movement formed in response to this throw-away culture, overconsumption, and the growing awareness of the environmental impact of plastic.
Origins Of The Zero Waste Concept
The term “zero waste” was (very likely) first used by a California-based company, “Zero Waste Systems Inc.” founded in the 1970s by chemist Dr. Paul Palmer.
However, it is also often credited to Daniel Knapp as emerging alongside his “Total Recycling” concept. In the 1990s, Knapp founded Urban Ore, a salvaging operation in Berkeley, California. Its mission? “To end the age of waste.”
In 1996, Knapp’s Total Recycling concept spread to Australia with the release of the Australian Capital Territory’s “No Waste by 2010” strategy, and back on home soil, Zero Waste USA, formerly the Grass Roots Recycling Network (GRRN), was formed.
In 2002, Richard Anthony (board member of the GRRN), brought together a team of experts (including Daniel Knapp) to bring the zero waste discussion to a resource conference in Geneva. Meeting after meeting followed, garnering worldwide interest, and the Zero Waste International Alliance (ZWIA) was formed in 2003.
Zero Waste Becomes A Lifestyle Movement
So, how did zero waste enter the blogging sphere and become a lifestyle movement?
In 2009, Bea Johnson launched her blog Zero Waste Home, followed in 2013 by her book of the same name that introduced the 5 R’s: Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and Rot.
And, well, it caught on. Other zero waste blogs followed, including Lauren Singer’s Trash Is For Tossers and Kathryn Kellogg’s Going Zero Waste, and an online zero waste community was born.
The “Mason Jar Challenge” took off and the internet was full of pictures of people’s trash jars.
While it has received several criticisms, this early symbol of the zero waste movement was at least attention-grabbing. It helped spread awareness of many of the issues involved in tackling the trash problem.
Many Roles At The Zero Waste Party
Within this movement, we must understand there are two sides to zero waste: the practical side (which deals more with our actions as individuals) and the conceptual side (which deals with systematic design). Much of the zero waste stuff we see in the press today deals with the practical side—like zero waste packaging, zero waste online stores, and bulk shopping.
Don’t get us wrong; we’re fans of all these things, too, but the future of the planet ultimately depends on something bigger. Let’s look at what zero waste means to both sides.
Getting Practical: How Individuals Contribute To "Zero Waste"
The city of San Jose, California best sums up zero waste in consumer practice: “Zero waste entails shifting consumption patterns, more carefully managing purchases, and maximizing the reuse of materials at the end of their useful life.”
Which is an eloquent way of referring to the 5 Rs of zero waste, which are:
- Refuse what you don’t need (single-use plastic, plastic grocery bags, plastic razors, coffee cups, etc.).
- Reduce what you consume (stop buying new clothes, cut back on how often you do laundry, don’t always upgrade for the latest smartphone).
- Reuse by either buying secondhand, renting, or repairing and repurposing things.
- Recycle only that which can’t be eliminated by the former three.
- Rot what’s left. The benefits of composting go far beyond just reducing landfill waste and this one has saved us personally an enormous amount of waste.
They’re essentially the order in which to reduce waste to optimize your low waste efforts If you can’t do step one, move on to the next, and so forth. Based on the Hierarchy of Material Management, the 5 Rs are also not a new concept, though Bea Johnson of Zero Waste Home (pretty much the OG zero waster of the 21st century) is often attributed as bringing it to the public.
Let’s Talk Trash (Jars)
You may be familiar with those intimidating little trash jars promoted by some dedicated zero wasters. It’s a triumphant visual aid to prove how little garbage one can produce if they try.
The trash jar is a subject of debate among sustainability circles, because no garbage does not equal no waste. Water waste, emissions, and chemical use are all ways we can waste the planet’s precious resources.
It also makes the zero waste lifestyle a lot more intimidating to beginners and outsiders, when in reality, you don’t need to confine a year’s worth of personal garbage to a mason jar to join the zero waste fun. Though not intentional, the trash jar promotes a message of perfection that’s simply not the reality of zero waste for most folks.
We’re proponents of progress over perfection. Going zero waste might mean incorporating one new habit into your daily routine each week, and that’s perfectly acceptable—and certainly a lot better than getting discouraged and quitting altogether because you feel like you aren’t doing enough.
But if you need a trash jar to help motivate your zero waste journey, then all the plastic-free power to you!
Recycling Vs. Zero Waste
You may be thinking, “I recycle all the time! Doesn’t that count as reducing my waste?”
To be blunt, no it doesn’t. Only 5-6% of plastics we’ve been diligently putting in those blue bins are actually recycled, so clearly, recycling is not the environmental solution we all thought it was—especially considering recycling often involves overseas shipment.
In other words, recycling is a band-aid that seeks to manage waste, whereas zero waste seeks to actually eliminate it (and entails more than just physical landfill trash). Recycling is merely a last resort of zero waste, meaning it alone is not a sufficient solution to either small or broad scope waste problems.
The Bigger Picture: Zero Waste As A Systemic Concept
Unfortunately, limiting our personal waste to tiny jars isn’t enough when you consider most waste occurs long before you actually buy the product or when the product eventually hits the landfill.
The average U.S. resident produces about 4.5 pounds per day—which is a drop in the bucket compared to the 292.4 million tons of municipal solid waste the US generates on the whole.
If we break out our calculator, that means US residents are responsible for about 745,000 tons of waste. So where are the other 200+ million tons coming from?
Businesses, industry, manufacturing…basically anything upstream before something reaches consumer hands. So what does zero waste mean in the context of this type of large-scale waste?
It offers a powerful holistic solution to the problem that us ordinary consumers can’t directly influence, all the way to the very design of the products we consume—encouraging the switch from disposable to reusable, cheap to durable, and synthetic to organic, obsolete to repairable.
Cradle-to-Cradle Circularity
Society currently operates via a one-way train of Extraction-Production-Consumption-Disposal. At the end of the line, products are thrown away, never to be used again. This is called ‘cradle-to-grave’.
Zero waste takes this linear industrial system and makes it a cyclical one, just as in nature itself. Nothing in nature is trash. Literally EVERYTHING is reused to create something new. By taking discarded resources and integrating them into the production system, we could realistically create a closed-loop system.
But not all materials—petroleum-based plastics, for one—are valuable resources and provide little reuse value. These must be entirely phased out of production in a zero waste system.
For such a circular economy to become a reality, we need systemic change by way of rules and regulations upholding manufacturer responsibility (both in resource extraction, product design, and production itself).
We also need a resource recovery infrastructure to replace landfills and incinerators. If you consider how few municipalities even offer commercial composting, we’re failing pretty hard at that.
The Impact Of The Zero Waste Movement
It might seem like an individual’s zero waste efforts are small potatoes compared to the big picture. Can one person actually make a difference?
YES! Your zero waste choice matters!
We definitely don’t want you to go away from this thinking your efforts are for naught. While we consumers may have little control over the industry itself, we do have control over other things that ultimately drive the industry forward. Our small choices inherently affect the direction it will go.
The brands we choose to support and products we buy inform manufacturers on what sorts of things to make. If we don’t buy cheap, disposable items, they’ll stop making them. The less we buy, the less will be made at all.
McKinsey and Nielsen recently found that more sustainable products (those with ESG claims) are seeing better growth than those without any claims. This means that consumer choices are actively driving change.
As a conscious consumer, this makes life easier. As we continue to put pressure on the market through our purchasing power, it becomes easier to find zero waste swaps for the things we use day to day and helps make zero waste and sustainable consumption choices more accessible to a wider group of people.
More importantly, it actually changes the ultimate amount of waste and destruction we’re creating from our consumption habits.
Zero Waste Product Innovation
Businesses are continuing to listen. Each year, more and more sustainable and zero waste products hit the market. The market’s idea of sustainability has expanded to include waste-free packaging and more transparency regarding the environmental impact of production.
The skincare and beauty industry, for example, is notorious for its use of plastic. Shampoo bottles, lotion bottles, deodorant tubes, lipstick tubes, etc, amount to 120 billion units of plastic per year.
But today, we can choose between dozens of deodorants in compostable tubes and ditch plastic bottles for good courtesy of shampoo and conditioner solid bars.
As a result of this plastic-free movement, new waste-free products and packaging solutions are invented every year, steadily replacing problematic consumer items like single-use plastic coffee pods, which now have a compostable alternative thanks to forward-thinking sustainable coffee brands.
Bulk Stores Are Blossoming
Another exciting sign of the times is the proliferation of zero waste stores, which have been popping up increasingly over recent years. You can take your own reusable containers and fill up on everything from fair-trade coffee to laundry soap. If your town doesn’t have package-free stores, you’ll likely find refill sections in natural grocery stores or refillable options online.
For example, Plaine Products has been leading the personal care product plastic-free movement for years. This circular brand ships its shampoo, conditioner, lotion, and body wash refills in reusable aluminum bottles along with a prepaid envelope for sending back your empties.
To clean other parts of your life, Greatfill offers refillable cleaning products in returnable pouches that they’ll then recycle and reuse.
Big Brands Are Joining In
Shopping at major retailers can be challenging for those of us who live a zero waste lifestyle. Their bulk sections aren’t always generous (if they exist at all), ethics in their sourcing policies and raw materials are often lacking, and many of their products come wrapped in plastic.
It’s not all bad, though. In addition to the burgeoning selection of sustainability-focused stores, major retailers (at least from a waste perspective) are starting to wake up and smell the garbage.
We all know Walmart isn’t perfect. As one of the world’s largest retailers, Walmart’s environmental footprint is complex, but the giant has set some ambitious waste-reducing goals, including making operations in the U.S. and Canada zero waste by 2025. By 2040, Target aims for all of its own brand items to be created with a circular future in mind. and in five years, Kroger’s Zero Hunger | Zero Waste initiative has rescued 582 million pounds of fresh food and diverted 82% of total waste.
On the fashion front, MUD Jeans turns old jeans into new ones and offers the option to lease a pair instead of buying, and Patagonia, the OG sustainable clothing brand incentivizes customers to trade in old clothing via its Worn Wear program.
Though for us, supporting small, local, ethical businesses is absolutely still the way to go.
There’s A Dark Side To The Zero Waste Movement: What It Got Wrong
Unfortunately, there is a dark side (as is the case with so many movements). Criticisms of the zero waste movement include:
- Overconsumption of zero waste products: Against the ethos of the whole concept, many zero wasters were influenced into buying things they didn’t actually need.
- Reusable products are less sustainable than disposables if used only once: For instance, a reusable cotton tote bag would need to be used 7,100 times to offset its environmental impact compared to a plastic bag used just once.
- Lack of accessibility: From high priced sustainable goods to proximity to bulk stores to having enough spare time to DIY your toothpaste or upcycle your holy jeans. It has became somewhat of an exclusionary movement that wasn’t accessible to everyone.
Despite this, we’d argue the positives outweigh the negatives and the outcomes of raising awareness, building community, questioning our collective consumption, influencing policy and highlighting corporate responsibility have made the whole effort worthwhile.
Where Is the Zero Waste Movement Heading? The Future Is Circular
There are increasingly calls for and action being taken to develop a circular economy, a model of production and consumption based on keeping products and their materials in use for as long as possible.
At an individual level, we can invoke change via activism and voting with our wallets for circular economy companies that are working to close the loop. Whether you’re focused on your own zero waste journey or working on a zero waste campaign for a business or community initiative, keep going!
There’s been lots of progress over the last fifteen years since Bea Johnson launched her inspirational blog and there’s still heaps of work to do, but the zero waste movement is having a positive impact.