Approaching Zero Waste

A great deal of my current waste-reduction efforts has been inspired by No Impact Man, an experiment in reducing one's ecological footprint to zero or even positive effects conducted by Colin Beavan that has spawned a book and documentary. Producing no trash was the first of five steps on his path to having no net ecological impact. The other four were:

No carbon-producing transportation
Sustainable eating
Sustainable consumption
No carbon-producing energy

As for me I have already made a lot of progress in eliminating trash-producing decisions and have almost completely avoided the garbage can for about a month now. A few habits and resources have helped me along the way.

1. Make your trash can inaccessible. Early on I found that out of force of habit I was throwing peels and otherwise recyclable materials into the trash without even noticing it. I could not lock my trash can up entirely because my roommates still use it, but I did make it a point to put it out of reach each time I was cooking, which was the activity responsible for most of my waste.

2. Cut plastic out of your diet. Since I cannot be sure that the plastic I consume will be recycled, downcycled or discarded by materials recovery and recycling facilities, I generally refuse to buy it. This will become a problem when my pens run out - maybe I will just use pencils - but for the time being I am avoiding anything that comes in plastic packaging. That means no bagged vegetables or bread, no boxed cookies or crackers, no condiments or toiletries unless they come in glass, paper or metal containers.

3. Biodegradability. Let nature recycle for you. There is much less work on our end if we simply buy what can rot. Humanity has had this incredibly efficient waste disposal system available to it throughout our entire history, doing us a favor and saving us labor. It is a wonder why we started to break from it at all. By invoking biodegradable pathways you can ensure that nutrients and other resources get returned to the earth for use by other forms of life and future generations.

4. Worms. So maybe a heap of stinking vegetable bits in your backyard is less than desirable. That is certainly the case in my city where any set up of that sort would attract RATS. Luckily my roommate took the initiative and bought us worms for our own in-house worm bin. A little weird I know but it provides a convenient way for us to dispose of our organic trash and so far it has not led to any odors or bugs to complain about.

There is one major difference between my strategy and that of No Impact Man. I am not counting recyclables as waste. Beavan argues that the recycling industry uses energy and other resources that we need for other causes, but I am focusing more on preventing the contamination of the ecology with harmful waste products and consider employing resources in recycling preferable to many other industries. If it can be reintegrated into the production process and in one way or another come to constitute the same form it originally had I am willing to buy it. That is why I find the purchase and recycling of glass, paper and metal acceptable. Plastics, on the other hand, are more complicated and not truly recyclable in many cases, which is why I advocate forgoing them.

Making the decision to eliminate garbage from your lifestyle certainly demands more planning and selectivity than conventional consuming does, but it is not without its advantages. If the knowledge that you are making an effort to lead a more sustainable lifestyle is not enough, I would advise keeping in mind an important point that Beavan makes in his book. If we treat the moments of our daily lives as hassles and obstacles that need to make way for the next ones, then what are we living for?

The Persistence of Garbage

Giant Gingko/Flickr

This is what I find to be a beautiful short film that gives some perspective and pause for thought on a phenomenon we are already fully aware of: many of the materials we use to produce goods last long beyond the useful lives of those goods:



Whether made of plastic or another substance, if our trash cannot decompose or otherwise degrade it stands to adversely impact not only the natural ecology, but also the quality of our lives. In the absence of a natural pathway for breaking down our trash into a more innocuous form or state, the possibility remains that we could accomplish it through the use of artificial or industrial means: recycling or engineering closed input-output loops into the production process.

But as we are aware of from our daily lives, even if we do not always think about it, the lugubrious reality is that the means for fully processing our waste do not exist and much of it slips through the cracks of our waste management system. It then escapes into and contaminates the environment, both human and natural.

This process is already playing out in the now well-publicized Pacific Garbage Patch and elsewhere. The problem is that plastic and other persistent rubbish cannot be converted into matter that can be usefully employed by organisms, existing natural cycles or by industry.

What is worse, what remains of our waste impairs life. At the macroscopic level this has taken the form of chicks dying after their parents feed them garbage, mistaking it for food. As far as plastic goes, once broken down into its basic molecules it interferes with biological pathways. Since plastic is photodegradable - broken down by light - this process inevitably occurs wherever plastic is exposed to light.

Plastics and other industrial chemicals have entered the human food web and trace amounts of them are already present in our bodies. In light of these developments it becomes clear to me that one of the major tasks before us on the path to sustainability will involve eliminating persistent waste. This will have to be accomplished either by taking advantage of natural processes to capture and recycle our wastes or by establishing synthetic means to do so.

Since I am not an engineer and in any event hold little top-down sway over the planning of manufacturers' production systems, the most salient way I can have an impact on the push to create no impact is, paradoxically enough, as a consumer. I may not be able to dictate what ingredients go into producing one product or service or another, how the outputs of those processes are disposed of, or how much it costs, but I can lend my support to businesses that incorporate sustainable practices. The rationale behind this approach is that if a critical proportion of consumers begins exhibiting such behavior, companies will respond accordingly, having been pitted against one another by the market in a race to do greener business. Once this process is well under way the system will transform itself from the inside out and we might already be witnessing the beginnings of this.

It is easy to criticize this approach, and even easier to criticize it without offering an alternative solution. One objection I expect is to the idea that people would be willing to engage in sustainable purchasing. It is seemingly irrational for someone to pay the higher costs traditionally associated with pursuing a more sustainable lifestyle. However, people engage in seemingly irrational economic behavior on a regular basis. They are willing to pay a premium on a product no materially different from a competing one for such things as a sense of status, aesthetics or other criteria.

Informed consumerism could similarly be motivated by such considerations. What is more, the premium on more sustainable alternatives in part translates into not just these abstract benefits but also material ones, such as cleaner water. If this were not a sufficient incentive it would be mainly because deterioration in environmental quality results from a tragedy of the commons and might warrant greater measures.

The difficulty is that it is not easy to determine what the sustainable alternatives are. You can attribute this to political spin, marketing and greenwashing, cryptic standards or more generally limits on individual knowledge and time. In my effort to find out to what extent the production of plastic could be made more sustainable, I discovered that some plastics are already biodegradable. One would think that this information would be pertinent enough to warrant the implementation of a clear standard and labeling systems for such plastics, but finding out which were was riddled with as much complexity as anyone who has looked into the recycling process for plastics has encountered.

My solution for this and similar issues is to overshoot. Instead of letting the complexity of these issues justify inaction, I have opted for the simple solution of cutting out of my consumer basket products incorporating anything other than those substances I know can be metabolized by ecology or industry. What that really means is that I am now refraining from buying any disposable or nondurable products unless they are biodegradable or fully recyclable - i.e. capable of reconstituting what they originally were - as glass and metal are.

The philosophy behind this is that if something consisting of essentially immortal materials will not be used in one way or another indefinitely, people should not buy it. As such, I have not completely ruled out laptops or other durable goods made from plastic. First, they last, and second, services exist for channeling their components back into production after the useful lives of the products themselves have ended. The reason such services exist is because there is money to be had in them and that will grow increasingly the case as people choose to make more sustainable purchases over those that promote persistent waste.