Recommended sources: Zero Waste Home (book by Bea Johnson; link: her top 100 tips); “The Rubbish Trip” (17min YouTube video); The Minimalists (Netflix doc; link: their blog).
Sometimes I am late to parties, but I tend to show up when I’m ready to commit to the vibe. As you likely have already heard, Zero-Waste is a(n environmentalist) thing; it’s been a thing. It was helpful for me to clarify its name before getting discouraged: zero waste is an asymptotic/impossible goal at this point, since eventually (after throwing out your trash can, swapping all your plastic containers for glass jars, mixing your own arrowroot toothpaste, and so on) you run up against limitations of policy and government, e.g. the recycling racket. The main contribution of this movement afaik is the inclusion of REFUSE at the top of the inverted Reduce/Reuse/Recycle pyramid we all know, as well as the inclusion of ROT (i.e., compost) at the tip of the pyramid (summary here).
It’s my kind of party, I'm learning now, because (as you know) I am interested in empowering the autonomy of the individual. Becoming thoughtful/conscientious in the Zero-Waste direction appeals to me for this reason. The idea is that you contribute to the health of the planet (and yourself as one of its local beings) most significantly by setting an example, i.e. by normalizing living with as little waste as possible. As a remedy for the undergrad-indoctrinated mental load of taking personal responsibility for climate change (vs. the gaslighting of fuel-guzzling corporations shaming individuals for accepting straws in their Starbucks, etc), “going Zero Waste” specifically gives you more control over your own home and body, what you bring into these micro/biomes, and how you share what you know and learn about sustainability and “living with less” with your friends and family. Dovetailing with minimalism, consuming less and having less stuff around can clear out space in your mind and heart, and tonify your relationships and ability to be present and grateful. As a series of personal and relational practices, consider Zero-Waste an evolving relationship to self and nature reads like spiritual pedagogy. So, of course, I’m down.
Discovering Bea’s book (I recommend it) was probably inevitable for me, given my upbringing (coastal California, humanistic/“alternative” Boomer parents), education (Berkeley), and lifestyle tendencies (transient, anticapitalist). Many of us (especially, I think, Milennials in the US) nurse the desire to be separate from a toxic superficial society, to rewrite our money stories, and to feel free and fulfilled apart from what we do or don't own. I have fit the “starving artist/student” profile since I was a teen, growing up in safety and luxury but always understanding there was neither allowance nor trust fund (nor property) coming down the pipe. Luckily during my adolescence thrifting was considered hip by my crowd (the art/theater/writing geeks); and the 20-year-old car my Dad found me (so I could drive my little sister and myself to high school and split domestic errands with my mom) passed as “vintage,” not beater, once it got a new coat of paint.
For a little context, at the private high school I attended in La Jolla, CA (back in Rihanna’s “Pon de Replay” days), it was considered normal to receive a brand-new matte Range Rover on your 16th birthday. If you crashed it, your parents would get you another one. Once I had to sign a form at the door of a classmate’s birthday party downtown because it was being filmed for an episode of MTV’s My Super Sweet 16, after which I ran into my AP Psychology teacher sipping a martini (or is that part a fabrication?).
Mine was one of a handful of scholarship families, which information I did not reveal to my friends at school (except the other two I knew were in the same boat). We were still in a house in one of the top three area codes of the city / suburbs, after all. My parents never talked about money (“it’s impolite”, “it’s personal”), but I knew from hearing through the walls that they fought about it (I had, and still have, supersonic hearing, which sensitivity has always revealed to me information I wish I didn’t have, and that became mine to deal with). I grew up with an under-discussed impression of wealth and value, distorted in two directions: I judged my family, and myself, as both too poor and too rich.
Contrast makes things easier to see. Cut to 2020, where Thee global meltdown found the former MTV extra living with her partner in a 90s Ford Econoline, a full-time graduate student / educator at a scrappy public research university in Santa Cruz. Terrified by the invisible death spreading, the other members of my shared house had scattered and our lease evaporated. Affordable sublets of other rooms eluded me, so I did what I had to and got in the van.
The weekend of July 4th, my partner and I were crashing with longtime friends in Oakland, the van parked outside and visible thru the window—at least until it vanished off the street overnight. We were moving base locations (from northern to southern California) that week, and my life’s belongings were in boxes underneath the bed in the back of the van: hundreds (upon hundreds) of books; all my clothes; shoes; jewelry; mirrors; memorabilia like diplomas, and landscapes old lovers had painted for me, and a string of wooden blocks my mother had played with as a baby. Whoops, all gone! On top of that, we no longer had a car, or a home.
Like the panoply of assorted material/psychological hits that all of us took during the pandy, it’s not really possible to describe the way this loss dazed us. Our people, however, saved us. Our hosts held us in so much love. One of our friends picked us up the next day and we snaked through the hills, hoping to glimpse a sign of the van peeking out among the live oaks and redwoods. Another friend came up from Santa Cruz and drove us, backpacks on our laps, from Oakland to San Diego (“sorry you got GTA’ed. Let's take 101. Wanna hit the In’n’Out?”). My mom let us wallow in her apartment for weeks, which we did, stupefied on her couch, until one morning the cops called from the car pound. My partner flew up the next day to retrieve it, and our Oakland friend met him and drove him way out to the county where it had been abandoned. Reggie himself (the van) was in driving condition, which was miraculous: our mode of transport and our living space was, or could be, restored. Everything inside, however—the contents of my life up to that point—had disappeared.
There are many, many environmentalist / anticonsumerist reasons and ways to “live with less.” Following my own narrative arc—the soft opulence of my childhood environs, then the ragged absence of adequate funding in my graduate program, and the climactic cold-plunge into minimalism (losing all my shit in a theft), I had already naturally discovered a lot of the features outlined in Zero Waste Home: DIY/maintenance (taking care of your things so they last); homemaking; slow food; minimalism/simplicity; anticonsumption/anticapitalism. Refusing and reducing plastic (especially food packaging), which I have never thought about much, is my goal for this summer. I made a few produce bags out of old t-shirts and am geeking over them.
There’s an episode of “Schitt’s Creek” where a grumpy Roland confides in Johnny that he’s lost touch with his adult son, who’s become something of a hippie: If he’d listened to me, the kid wouldn’t be living in a hut making his own underwear. It’s fair to say that if I hadn’t lost my shit (literally, tho also figuratively as a result), I wouldn’t be a hippie making my own ghee/yogurt/deodorant/jewelry/produce bags. It helps to be living in a medium-sized city in (post-DDR) East Germany, where both scrappiness and environmental awareness are very high. Now if we could just get them to give up the auto industry...1
The sublet I live in currently, eg, is outfitted with lots of good German practicality that I’ll take with me to all my future housing situations. The apartment is minimally furnished; the furniture is all old, natural materials, multi-use, well-cared-for. There are no paper towels, but a stack of good dish towels. Instead of sponges, there is a single wooden-handled bristle brush for cleaning dishes. Down the road at the grocery store (a short bike ride), I discovered that loose apples (et al.) collected in a reusable bag I bring will cost the same or less than a plastic bag prefilled with the same apples (et al.). Leipzig composts, which makes that easy (if your city doesn't, any nearby garden would likely love to rot yours). To reduce my plastic consumption and chemical/toxic load (expensive all-natural toiletries are not in my budget), I stopped using shampoo and conditioner eight months ago (with fine 2C/3A curls, at that).2
In noting down the above list of anecdotal “Zero-Waste”-adjacencies, I feel like I’m bragging—look at me, I ride my bike, I eat fresh produce, I have the time and wherewithal to sit and think about doing something about all the plastic containers in my bathroom. It’s uncomfortable to display pride or personal satisfaction publicly—and this throws back to the inherited taboo around affluence, and the contemporary self-conscious self-cancellation of being happy when the world is ending. But the rush of my being housed (and consequently able to think with one eye on the future) after being unhoused really registers as a rush these days, and I want to share the love. That flashpoint of losing all my stuff—experiencing what Kerouac called being a divine loser—really helped with the transition to ZW-aspirant.
A commitment to pleasure helps, too. The sensual and intellectual pleasures available in eating and cooking and grooming and foraging for free clothes have motivated me more than German-practicality peer pressure or guilt and stress about climate catastrophe. I don’t want to underemphasize how much I have to appreciate and enjoy an action for me to be willing to repeat it. Chopping fruits and vegetables looks and feels good. Dissolving baking soda into water in a little jar in the shower, the translucent powdery water looks good. Massaging then rinsing the grit of the mixture into then out of my scalp feels good. Getting out of your mind and into your body is the foundation of modern contemplative spiritual practice (or so I argue in my dissertation…). Prioritizing and milking pleasurable activities3 has been my body’s way into this Zero-Waste stuff.
In conclusion: lose to gain: hone your practice of appreciation. Here’s a poem (the poem, so any literary heads reading this will excuse the cheesiness) by Elizabeth Bishop. It’s probably the most famous villanelle in 20th-century literature in English. It complements this post because it treats the art of losing and “letting go” as an occasion for acknowledging grief, that state of being that often clings to trauma long after the event or person has passed. Grief is not something that is ever finished; but there will come a time, as David Kessler puts it, where “you can think of [whatever, whomever] you lost with more love than pain.”
Choosing to let go of everyday wasteful things (or harmful practices) is hard to master. Sometimes a thief lends a hand. If you choose to minimize and clean up your surroundings in this Zero-Waste direction, even a little, you may feel the ebbs and flows of grief as you let things (and habit patterns) go. May this poem serve as a sardonic accompaniment as you fjord along, cutting a new path from your losses...
One Art
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Or enforce a rule: You can have a car so long as it’s your primary (and only) residence. So recommended my partner when we were casually prescribing plans for California’s pan-class social sickness—a common topic for contemplation when you’re unhoused in a suburban area dominated by expensive and often empty real estate.
if you’re interested in NoPoo, you can start here, & if you have curls you can integrate that info with this info…but beware, this combo rabbithole is not for the faint of heart. Good luck not getting lost in the sauce)
For more on this, see “Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good,” by adrienne marie brown.