A couple of months ago, I was binge-watching TedTalks on youtube, and I came across one titled "Why I live a Zero Waste life". Of course, the term Zero Waste intrigued me, so I clicked.
Lauren Singer (above), a young women living in New York, started talking about how much trash Americans produce everyday (each American produces about 4.5 pounds of trash everyday), and about how she wanted to leave the world a better place, on which she will have had as little negative impact as possible. As a result, all of her trash form the past 3 years fit in a small Mason jar. Impressive, huh?
I started researching a bit more into this Zero Waste phenomenon, and I was hooked. My eyes were opened. Why do I own so many things? Why is there so many things that we allow ourselves to throw away? Why do we allow ourselves to deteriorate the Earth in such ways?
"Away". This magical land where we believe our trash moves onto after we dispose of it. That's where the phrase "Out of sight, out of mind" takes all its meaning. We believe, because our trash is regularly taken care of after we put in outside our homes, that it just goes away somewhere, and that it stops being our problem as soon as we can't see it anymore. But "away" does not exist! All of our trash ends up in landfills and STAYS there, pretty much forever. That causes a whole lot of environmental problems which I am not qualified to discuss deeply, but we all know about them. The planet is heating up, oceans are contaminated, toxins are leaked into the ground that grows our food, into the air that we breathe.
I quickly became aware of everything I was disposing of in my trash can, and I told myself that it had to stop. I couldn't bare to throw things away mindlessly anymore. That's when I first dabbled into the Zero Waste life style.
The first step, which I had previously decided to take, was to declutter et minimize my life. Now, I had started to do this prior to wanting to reduce my waste, but I still have a long way to go to be satisfied with myself. I went through everything: clothes, junk drawers, school and art supplies, sewing supplies, make up, skin care, EVERYTHING got downsized, and radically so.
I have to say, my head feels so much lighter thanks to this. To me, a cluttered environment is very daunting.
Whilst I am still in the process of downsizing, or decluttering, I also want to lessen my impact on the world by drastically reducing the amount of waste I produce. I will soon upload another post about some easy changes I made, and that you could make too, to reduce waste.
See you soon!
:)
No comments:
Post a Comment