Shia Su - Zero Waste: Simple Life Hacks to Drastically Reduce Your Trash

Printed on sustainably sourced paper using soy inks.

Copyright 2016 Freya Verlag GmbH

English Translation 2018 Skyhorse Publishing

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design and interior layout by Christina Diwold

Cover photo credit by Shia Su

All photos by Shia Su, unless mentioned otherwise.

Photos of nuts on from Freedom_Studio,
Binh Thanh Bui, Tukaram.Karve, and windu/Shutterstock.com.

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-3081-6

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-3082-3

Printed in China

For my mom.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

ZERO WASTE LIVINGA MODERN REEMERGENCE OF AN OLD LIFESTYLE

Many people find it hard to wrap their heads around how little trash my partner and I produce at home. No way, thats unreal! is the most common reaction we get when people find out that our annual collection of nonrecyclable and plastic waste amounts to a quart jar.

Well, we do not live completely zero waste, as our waste-stuffed jar proves. And yes, there is more: 6.5 pounds of paper waste, 0.2 pounds of metal waste such as bottle caps and staples, a dozen bottles and jars, and kitchen scraps (which we now compost in our kitchen after we finally gathered enough courage to give the rather unconventional idea of having worms as pets a try [see ]).

Whenever we talk to older folks, we get a very different reaction. They usually laugh out loud, saying to us youngsters: Oh, come on! Living waste-free is old news! At this point, they often start to give us practical advice: how to unclog the sink without all the chemical gimmicks, for example; and have we ever tried to just wrap our sandwich in a dish towel?

As a matter of fact, only a few decades ago, everybody lived a zero waste lifestyle. Of course, nobody called it zero waste back thenit was just the normal way of life. We have only adapted a wasteful lifestyle very recently, and one can argue that this is not progress but rather a short-sighted high with a sudden crash that will be served with a side of regret.

WE ARE COLLECTIVELY BLIND TO TRASH

Trash has become such an integral and seemingly natural part of our daily lives that we never stop to think about it. We toss the empty shampoo bottle into the trash can. We bring out the trash. The moment the smelly bag leaves our home, it is out of sight, out of mind.

Of course, we know that this trash does not simply vanish into thin air. We know about toxic landfills. Some of us already know that recycling isnt as green as we would like to thinkshipping recyclables across the globe is a common practice. We have heard about our oceans drowning in plastic. We are concerned that trash is disrupting the entire food chain and already found its way onto our plates. But for some reason, none of that knowledge is at the forefront of our minds when we shop, grab a coffee, or are freeing an organic cucumber from its plastic shrink-wrap.

According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the average American generated 1,620 pounds of garbage in 2014. This is a whopping 4.44 pounds per day! But what happens to all of it after it has been collected? In the US, only 34.6 percent is recycled, 12.8 percent is combusted for energy recovery, and the rest is landfilled.

Around the globe, countless campaigns have been run to promote recycling. However, in the end, recycling only fights the symptoms, but not the cause, of our waste problem, especially since we often take recyclable labels as a permission to produce wasteIts OK, its recyclable! Wouldnt it be better not to trash the environment in the first place and only attempt to fix the damage afterward ? Not to mention that what we commonly refer to as recycling is in fact often only down-cyclingthe transformation of the original material into a lower quality product that is oftentimes no longer recyclable.

Waste management facility.

If we are serious about counteracting climate change, the only way to make a difference is to reduce our impact on the environment and reframe our mind-set.

It is not about recycling more. It is about wasting less.

A ZOMBIE APOCALYPSEKIND OF MISTAKE?

As we all know too well, our economy is based on growth. This means we must consume more and more in order to keep hitting those growth expectations that signal a healthy economy. And we do a pretty good job at keeping up. We continue buying things, even though we already have an abundance of stuff at home, stuff that is much more than we need or could ever use. If everyone on this planet consumed as much as the average US citizen, we would need four earths to sustain us!