finding my way towards a zero waste life
About a month ago, I ran into my friend Angela on my morning train to work. "How's zero waste going?" she asked. I get this question a lot. "It's good," I would usually say, "it's hard and takes a lot of work." But on this morning, I had a new answer: something is different in my brain. Something fundamental.
The past month has been challenging. No matter how hard I try, I am plagued by my failures. I have been procrastinating on my blog posts because I feel embarrassed. But when I sat down to work on this post, I started by making a list of “good” things and “bad” things. As it turns out, there are a lot of things I can be happy about.
I want to dedicate a post to the all the exciting news I've been seeing lately. After joining a few Facebook groups for zero waste, the number of articles I'm seeing has increased tremendously. It makes me wonder if I'm just living in this anti-plastic bubble, or whether this is truly a trending topic across this country and much of the developed world.
Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the waste at work. As I've previously mentioned, I see a lot of waste generated on a daily basis, and my company's main office is in a building that does not do recycling. For the past year, my desk has been at a different building nearby that does… Continue reading Changes at work, and the cost of zero waste
Since I started composting, the number one thing that fills my garbage bins is, by far, paper products. Paper towels, napkins, tissues, you name it. In fact, outside of my kitchen, all the garbage bins contain tissues or toilet paper almost exclusively. I realized very early on that this would be my biggest hurdle.
It was inevitable. Last week, my social media feed became all of sudden filled with articles about waste or sustainability or plastic pollution. I guess Facebook/Instagram and Google and Twitter have caught on to my new project, and while I learned a lot, it also brought me on an emotional rollercoaster.
Over the past few weeks, I've adopted some, what I consider to be, low-hanging fruit solutions to the problem of waste production.
I thought I'd start by painting a picture of the environment I live in, my current practices, and all the challenges that I still face.
I have decided that in 2018, I am going to attempt to achieve a zero waste life, and to gain a real understanding of the environmental impact of our lifestyle choices.
Zero Waste and Beyond 