‘If you do anything different or outside of the box, or if you’re an agent for change, people often feel unsettled.’
—Stella McCartney
‘At first, my message was negative—use less—but gradually I realised there was another way of looking at things.’
—Ellen MacArthur
Plastic Free July could change your life. Erin Rhoads was a graphic designer when she took up the challenge in Melbourne after stumbling across it online. ‘Who knows, maybe I will adopt this forever,’ she wrote on her then six-month-old blog, The Rogue Ginger (she’d begun it as a travel diary and had managed a few posts about riding her bike and making onion soup). Today Rhoads is Australia’s best-known zero-waste blogger, the author of a book called Waste Not and an eco-lifestyle guru. ‘I’d typed in, “How do I reduce my plastic?” No one had really discovered Plastic Free July yet; it was still very new,’ she says.1 ‘I didn’t know it was going to be a movement. I just wanted some tips to change my habits and it worked, so I kept going.’
‘Hello more vegetables and fruit,’ she blogged thirteen days in. Easier to skip premade food since so much of it came in plastic. She cut her take-away habit and discovered her apartment block had a compost bin. Small changes like freezing vegetable scraps to make stock led to more profound ones. ‘The more I learned about my power, the more I realised I could take responsibility on these issues,’ she tells me. ‘Simple things, like I don’t have to buy body wash in a plastic bottle, so I don’t have to give my tacit consent to the companies that make it. Or I can sit here and have a cup of tea with you instead of rushing off with it in a plastic-lined cup destined for the bin. Rushing, creating this busyness in our lives, why do we do it? We can choose not to. Take a breath, relax. It’s all connected.
‘Look at how single-use coffee cups have become the poster child for reducing waste. That’s good, they suck, but we’re talking so much about the cups and not enough about what’s going into them,’ says Rhoads. ‘People grow the coffee beans, spend their lives cultivating the plants; the beans need to be picked, washed, roasted, and whatever else happens to coffee. I’m not the expert, but I can see that the beans take time and trouble to produce. Then in the café a barista spends time and effort making the perfect cup of coffee. Since when did we forget to appreciate all that? We just chug it down and chuck it away. What I’m saying is, we need to reconnect with the processes behind the things we consume. So yes, you could say Plastic Free July changed everything for me.’
After she took Prince-Ruiz’s challenge, Rhoads saved a year’s worth of unrecyclable rubbish in a mason jar (toothbrush bristles, fruit stickers, those annoying plastic thingos they punch through the price tags in op shops) and took to toting it around schools to inspire kids to be the change. She made her own mascara and used tapioca flour as face powder. In 2015 she helped start Plastic Bag Free Victoria. They collected 11,600 signatories, in person, for a petition to ban the free distribution of single-use plastic bags. ‘We took it to the Victorian Parliament; it was the biggest petition in the last decade,’ says Rhoads (online ones don’t count). It worked. The environment minister announced a ban in October 2017. ‘We brought together all the plastic-bag-free groups in the state and we just pushed and pushed. The quickest way to achieve change is through legislation,’ says Rhoads.
Okay, but why did she overhaul her entire life, and make zero waste her work and building the movement her mission, when others take the plastic fast for a month and emerge with a KeepCup but otherwise unchanged? We are the sum of our experiences. Plastic Free July was Rhoads’s second zero-waste lightbulb moment. Her first came from watching Canadian documentary The Clean Bin Project. The film tracks a young couple from Vancouver as they attempt to ‘buy no more stuff and produce zero landfill’ for an entire year. They set some rules; they could buy work essentials, for example. If they generated waste while they were eating out, they would have to bring it home. Any packaging generated that wasn’t compostable, biodegradable or recyclable must be saved up and stored in their personal bins—one each—to be counted and weighed at the end of the challenge. Rhoads found the film, which features an interview with Charles Moore, fascinating. But she also has the right mindset: she’s the sort who questions things and wants to live a meaningful life, beyond just having nice stuff, a good job, a fancy car. There were missionaries in her family, and observing the way her relatives lived and viewed service to their fellow humans—‘My grandmother went to work in Uganda as a nurse when she was sixty; my cousin did work in South Africa in an orphanage; my uncle went to Haiti to help rebuild after the 2010 earthquake; they all donated their time’—left Rhoads with an understanding that ‘we have a responsibility to each other; we don’t exist in isolation.’
Rhoads just had to find her thing, which wasn’t religious, unless you count the Church of Oprah. ‘I watched it with my mum. Until you asked me, it’s not like I thought, Oh yes, this thing has its roots in Oprah! But you know what? I do think Oprah taught a lot of us how to respond to different situations, and to listen. I think she taught a generation: let’s talk. And she didn’t discriminate. Her approach was, “You might be rich; you might be poor. I don’t care. Anyone can come here and talk through an issue with me.”’
There was a particular episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show that struck a chord with Rhoads. It featured the Australian doctor Catherine Hamlin, then eighty, who over five decades had operated, free of charge, on more than 25,000 African girls and women at the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital. ‘I remember feeling very moved and determined to help.’ Rhoads had a bake sale. ‘Obviously that’s really small, but it got me thinking about how I can help people with my money, and who and what I want to support with it.’ Later, like many a kid just out of college, she wanted to spend it on travel.
India was where Rhoads first started to worry about trash. It’s a very visible problem there. Indian street cows have been found with 30 kilograms of plastic in their stomachs.2 The trip was also formative because it reframed Rhoads’s thinking about privilege, consequence, responsibility and changing the conversation, although she admits the penny didn’t drop immediately: ‘I was twenty-two when I visited India, and it was confronting seeing what real poverty can look like, but it was also about coming to realise, through a few different experiences, how to join the dots.’ She pauses. ‘How much ideas from my culture have disrupted other cultures, and how it’s our fault; that colonial mindset coming along and messing things up. I saw the cows eat the plastic, and everything smells smoky from burning the trash, which is now plastic and toxic, and I thought, Which companies introduced plastic into India? And how come they didn’t also bring systems to dispose of the waste? I didn’t know the answers, but I knew something was wrong with the overall picture.’
If you want to change the world, start with yourself by all means, but to be truly effective you have to figure out how the system operates and might be improved, then bring others along with you to push to change it.
I tell Rhoads about the months I spent in India in the late ’90s when I was around the same age that she was when she went. How I visited ashrams and tried to write a novel and travelled everywhere by train. I’ve seven years on her, and plastic rubbish wasn’t such an issue then. The chai wallahs sold their brews in clay cups, and we merrily chucked them out of the train windows when we were done drinking. Earth to Earth. Dinner was delivered from the canteen on metal platters, which were then collected for reuse. Street vendors still sold snacks in paper bags upcycled from old newspapers, the sewing of which provided work. Now I’m not saying that was necessarily dignified work—what do I know?—but it was part of a functioning system that didn’t leave piles of trash a metre high along the railway tracks. By 2016, New Delhi railway station alone was generating more than 4000 kilograms of plastic waste a day. In 2004 the Indian railways minister Lalu Prasad Yadav tried to bring back the clay teacups, but he was accused of keeping the potters in poverty work, polluting the air with smoke from the kilns and subjecting commuters to ‘problems like shape, structure, wobbly base, loss of taste of drink, and so on’.3 The minister also launched a program to replace synthetic train seat covers with homespun cotton, but that wasn’t to be either. By the time he was imprisoned for corruption in 2017, almost all the teacups on Indian trains were plastic. But there is hope: on World Environment Day 2018, India’s prime minister announced plans to eliminate single-use plastics from the whole country by 2022. Wouldn’t that be fantastic? I’m crossing my fingers.
Rhoads and I are meeting for a cuppa—in reusable porcelain, thank you—at Australia’s National Sustainable Living Festival, where we’re both speaking about waste at separate events. The festival began around the time I was trying to find myself in India and has grown from a small gathering outside Daylesford, Victoria, to a month-long annual jamboree in Melbourne. This year 100,000 people are expected. It is clear just from looking around us that this movement is building, and that the old silos are less relevant as environmentalists across interests are talking, and sharing ideas. Crowds are browsing stalls run by wildlife societies and eco-activists, permaculture and composting experts, urban bee-keepers, foragers and Earthship builders. In one area, the team from Suitcase Rummage has set up, attracting second-hand fashion fans; in another, a ‘wild woman’ teaches bush survival skills that include tanning your own wallaby hide with a view to sewing it (using the animal’s sinew as thread) into a sort of primitive Viking lady jerkin.
‘This,’ I say to Rhoads, ‘is pretty full on.’ I’ve dressed down so as not to scare the hardcore eco people. Rhoads, however, is having none of that—she’s straight outta the Hamptons in a blue-and-white frock and toting a raffia clutch embroidered with eyelashes and red lips. She is making a visual point: that if self-tanning a hide is not your thing, there are no style limits to zero-waste and buy-nothing-new living. Her entire outfit is thrifted.
‘Your first time?’ she says. ‘It gets bigger every year.’
‘And how big is zero waste? Not just at the festival but in general?’
‘Zero waste is huge,’ she says. ‘Even if it’s just taking the elements that work for you, the concept has caught on.’
‘And people don’t think you’re crazy anymore.’
‘Look, some of them do,’ she laughs, as she takes her eleven-month-old son into her arms. ‘But seriously, this is for him. I use this analogy: say you’re about to go into a bedroom and it’s really messy and someone tells you that first you have to clean it up. You think, I shouldn’t have to clean this mess! I didn’t make it. You get really frustrated. Well, that’s what the next generation is going to be stuck with. My son will be cleaning up our plastic waste, and our environmental mismanagement.’
He was a zero-waste baby, swaddled in second-hand muslins, bathed in a second-hand tub, and dried with towels from an op shop. His pram and other essentials were passed down by extended family. Rhoads used washable cloth nappies. ‘Why not? Our grandmothers did it.’
While we’re in the mood for taking inspiration from our grandmas, I offer up the story of Kamikatsu, a ‘zero-waste town’ in south-western Japan. In this beautiful mountainside settlement surrounded by rice terraces, half of the 1600 residents are over the age of sixty-five, a quarter over eighty-five, and they sort their waste into forty-five separate categories. It used to be thirty-four, but they keep finding ways to improve the system.
The villagers introduced their zero-waste goal for economic reasons. Until the ’90s, they’d burned most of their trash, but that became a problem as Japan stepped up its penchant for plastic. The government banned open incineration in 1994, so Kamikatsu installed a compliant incinerator, but three years later, the rules changed and they couldn’t afford to upgrade. The solution, they decided, was to go cold turkey on unrecyclable trash.
Kamikatsu residents now compost 100 per cent of food waste and make money from onselling carefully sorted glass of various colours, aluminium, steel, various plastics. ‘We’ve impacted people’s consumption,’ explains Akira Sakano, chair of Kamikatsu’s Zero Waste Academy.4 ‘There was a change in the citizens’ mind-set not to pollute our Nature too—all the grannies stood up fighting against the incineration.’5
Sakano reminds us that zero waste is a symbolic goal: ‘It is a slogan, like “zero drunk-driving”. Of course, there will always be that one incident, but by saying “zero” you can be creative enough to achieve 99 per cent. You can engage more people, which is the main goal of zero waste.’6 What the phrase really means is ‘zero waste to landfill’ anyway, or we might say, zero wasted waste—the logical extension of reduce, reuse, recycle, repair.
Ariana Schwarz, an American zero-waster who blogs at Paris to Go, pins it down: ‘Zero waste is an industrial term for a consumer movement encouraging manufacturers to eliminate single-use items and non-biodegradable materials. The aim is to push towards a circular economy and increase demand for package-free products or reclaimable packaging.’7
If an entire zero-waste village is unusual, zero-waste influencers, families and community groups are no longer rare. Rhoads tells me about early adopter Béa Johnson, the California-based French mother of two dubbed by The New York Times the ‘Priestess of waste-free living’. It was Johnson who inspired Rhoads to try the mason jar experiment.
In 2008, Johnson started sewing cloth bags from old sheets and taking them along to do her bakery shop. Soon she was buying staples in bulk, and taking her own jars to the deli to eliminate cheese, meat and fish wrappers. When asked why, she found it easier to say she didn’t have a trash can rather than go into a long speech about her motivations. These include reconnecting with the people who make, sell and serve our food. She finds zero waste ‘a more human way of shopping because it forces you, in a way, to have contact with the person behind the counter … it gives a better sense of community because you care more about them and they care about you.’8
While Rhoads and Schwarz have clearly spent much time considering the environmental and sociopolitical context of what they are trying to achieve (in one blog post, Schwarz writes, ‘It bothers me that eco-friendly behaviour is associated with environmental racism, when garbage is so widely used as a tool of oppression’), Johnson seems happy to keep zero waste filed under lifestyle movement and personal growth: it’s good for her and her family; it makes life simpler and clearer; it saves them money.
That said, Johnson is happy to share with those who are curious. Her book, Zero Waste Home, has been translated into twenty languages, and being the picture of French elegance, she is well-placed to reach aspirational consumers. To watch her in a video climbing the stone steps to her minimal-chic house in high-heeled ankle boots, carrying her cloth-bagged groceries, is to think, Zero waste can be stylish! Nothing wrong with that. In fact, it’s the approach I take with my sustainable fashion work.
New York cool girl Lauren Singer has a similar effect. Through her website, Trash is for Tossers, sustainable laundry detergent brand The Simply Co., and the Package Free Shop in Brooklyn, Singer is turning a whole new crowd onto the benefits of zero-waste living. Her journey, tips and tricks have been written up in major fashion glossies, helping to bring the mainstream into the movement. When CNN visited Singer’s store to check out its wares, which include menstrual cups and bamboo toothbrushes, they concluded: ‘Sound like hippy-dippy, tree-hugging nonsense? You’re wrong. The zero-waste movement has teeth, and it’s coming to a city near you.’9
True that. New York and San Francisco (again) have zero-waste goals. For those who can’t wait for the municipal plans to come to fruition, there are thousands of Facebook and community groups. The Zero Waste Europe network is active in seven countries, and its members include Retorna, the Spanish NGO that’s reintroducing the container take-back schemes that were popular in Spain in the ’80s. Zero-waste bloggers are mushrooming. In Australia, there are no fewer than three zero-waste books coming out in a year. Zero waste is the next big thing.
So why doesn’t everyone love it? As usual, women’s voices are part of the problem. A Reddit feed reveals that some lament the lack of male role models in the scene. One man commented, ‘If a bloke takes a casual look into it and literally only sees lifestyle blogs from stay-at-home mums, he’s not coming back.’10
It is no coincidence that most of the zero-waste advocates I’ve come across are women. The fact that it’s still overwhelmingly women who decide what’s for dinner plays its part, and while there must be straight men out there buying gadgets, clothes and whatever it is that keeps them coming back to Bunnings (it’s the sausage sizzle, isn’t it?), many clearly loathe shopping. The reasons for this are rooted in social conditioning and the patriarchy—in the nineteenth century, for example, the new department stores and arcades provided public spaces for middle-class women, previously cloistered in the home, to congregate—but the fact remains: women shop.
According to Forbes, ‘if the consumer economy had a sex, it would be female’—women drive 70–80 per cent of purchasing decisions.11 According to me, we’re fed up with excessive packaging being foisted upon us by supermarkets; rant on social media about cling-wrapped bananas and the conversation goes off. We’re fed up with over-packaged, processed food laden with sugar and additives, and we’re looking for better ways to live in harmony with the environment and each other. Sustainability is not a buzz word for nothing. And thanks to television shows like War on Waste, garbage has become a hot-button issue, no longer the preserve of government departments, landfill operators or materials-recovery plants. It’s a community problem with community solutions. In a thought-provoking piece for the environmental arts magazine she founded, Loam, Kate Weiner writes that:
Delegitimizing the diversity of philosophies and practices within the zero waste movement is a way to write off the significant social impact of a thriving community that has been largely shaped and sustained by non-patriarchal bodies. Many popular low-waste living practices—such as creating healing herbal remedies and cultivating a trash-light home—are considered ‘feminine’ pursuits. And so, like everything ‘feminine’ in our mainstream culture, it’s discarded.12
More so when it’s young women.
Schwarz, then twenty-seven, was featured in a 2016 UK newspaper article13 about zero-waste bloggers, along with Singer, then twenty-four, Kathryn Kellogg, twenty-five, of Going Zero Waste and Celia Ristow of Litterless, also twenty-four (and a man actually—Rob Greenfield—who wrote a book called Dude Making a Difference and begins his biography, ‘Not that long ago, my main priorities included binge drinking every weekend, looking good, and macking on pretty much every good looking girl I saw.’ Then he grew up, and now does all of the things: zero waste, permaculture gardening, wholefood diet, lived off-grid in a tiny house before he downsized to a backpack.) Anyway, that story was widely read and caused wide annoyance. There’s just something about zero waste that riles people. Is it a perceived smugness, perhaps, that makes mere mortals with overflowing wheelie bins feel somehow less? Less exemplary, less disciplined, less spotless-all-white marble kitchen, more pasta sauce on the lapel? Schwarz accepts that ‘people like to poke holes in the concept of zero waste’ and that some find it ‘preachy, self-righteous, or extreme’. Whatever. ‘Living in post-industrial society is wasteful,’ she says. ‘Instead of nitpicking or worrying about things we can’t change, we just try to live as responsibly as we can, and help others who want to do the same.’
The bit she does worry about is the charge that zero waste is exclusive, that it’s the ‘You can’t sit with us’ of the environmental movement. ‘I’m definitely guilty of saying anybody can be zero waste, and I’m sorry for that, because it isn’t practical for everyone and not always appropriate.’
Erin Rhoads’s husband is Lebanese Australian, so it felt close to home as they watched Beirut’s trash crisis unfold over the summer of 2015. As protestors hit the streets, they chanted, ‘The people want to topple the regime!’ and the riot squad was called. But the issue that prompted 4000 citizens to risk tear gas and arrest by protesting that August was total garbage, more specifically the uncollected sort. Since June great piles of it had been rotting in the streets and surrounding mountainside. In desperation people were setting fire to it, releasing acrid clouds of smoke. Then in extraordinary scenes, entire streets turned into rivers of trash. The crisis was political, fuelled by corruption, government inefficiency and mismanagement, but the impacts are social.
Piles of garbage, whether illegally dumped, uncollected or whisked away to landfill, emit methane, which adds to global warming. They attract pests and leak bin juice, called leachate, which can poison ground water and agricultural land. When e-waste (old computers, phones, appliances and the like) is buried in landfill, it adds heavy metals to the mix. Nobody wants a landfill in their backyard, but not everyone gets to choose.
In Beirut, activists, organised by the online group You Stink, parked themselves in tents outside the Ministry of Environment, waving placards bearing the familiar slogan, ‘Recycle, reuse, refuse.’
When the system falls over as it did in Beirut—or in Naples, Italy, and its surrounding farmland, where the mafia has facilitated the illegal dumping of toxic industrial waste since the 1990s, leading to cancer clusters and export bans on the local buffalo mozzarella cheese—everybody suffers. But when it ‘works’ (that is, when our garbage is collected on time and dealt with legally and efficiently), most people don’t have to worry about it. However, as we have seen with the story of ocean plastic, that doesn’t mean it’s not causing problems, and as usual it is the environment and the most marginalised communities that are most effected. Recycling is awesome—we should be doing more of it—but it’s no magic bullet.
Rich people, as Adam Minter points out in Junkyard Planet, recycle more stuff. ‘If you take a drive through a high-income, highly educated neighborhood on recycling day, you’ll see [designated] bins overflowing with neatly sorted newspapers, iPad boxes, wine bottles, and Diet Coke cans. Meanwhile, take a drive through a poor neighborhood, and you’ll invariably see fewer bins, and fewer recyclables.’14 Wealthy people might be ‘good stewards’ of their trash, but they also do ‘an equally fine job of generating it’.15 Says Minter, diligent recyclers patting themselves on the back would do well to remember, ‘Recycling is just a means to stave off the trash man for a little longer.’16 If you really want to be environmentally responsible, you’ll take Rebecca Prinze-Ruiz’s challenge and reduce.
Towards the end of 2017, a Four Corners report revealed massive stockpiles of used glass building up in Australian warehouses. Prices had collapsed, and it was just sitting there. But New South Wales laws limit the amount of time waste can be stored, so criminal gangs were running rackets to smuggle it over state boarders and illegally dump it. Suddenly, popping our wine bottles into our yellow bin didn’t feel so virtuous. At the very same time China was introducing its ‘foreign garbage’ bans, and in 2018 Australia stopped dispatching its used plastic and cardboard there, amid talk of some councils abandoning kerbside recycling services completely. What are we going to do: deal with our own waste, reshore manufacturing and close the loop? It would be nice. Regulate to boost demand for recycled content in packaging? Dig more landfills? Cutting down our rubbish would obviously help, and you and I can start doing that right now. China, incidentally, is the world’s biggest ocean plastic polluter, so they have their work cut out for them trying to fix that. The second biggest is Indonesia. But don’t be quick to judge: per capita, Americans consume by far the most plastic, and Australians are among the highest generators of household waste.
Think about all this. Does the zero-waste movement still sound like a privileged white girl’s lifestyle choice or a bit of unimportant female fussing? Or does it sound like a smart strategy to remake our world so that all of us might live with less bin juice and greater empathy for Nature and each other? A peaceful revolution fought with cloth bags and common sense? I’m in.