So I finished another essay recently. As is the case with most of my writing, it doesn't get at exactly everything I wanted to say but alas, here it is. (It's also on my Medium page, which you can see here. I half-heartedly pitched it to a few places but heard nothing so to the Medium page it goes!). I've been following the zero waste trend for a few years and finally got around to organizing some of my thoughts about it below. I hope you enjoy ‒ especially all of my zero waste friends, who may find it critical but hopefully it comes out as more thoughtful? Here's to hoping, and to calling this one done. As always, comments and thoughts encouraged!

The Allure of Zero Waste

It seems reasonable to say that we have a problem with plastic.

I’m often shocked at the amount of packaging — plastic or not — that I use every day, and the effect of this is often anxiety-inducing. All of the waste amassing in our oceans and landfills and alongside our sidewalks deeply disturbs me, mainly because I like things to be neat and clean but also because I know that there is little hope of it going away anytime soon. Still, the 4 million tons of trash we produce a day is a problem that I never knew what to do about until I stumbled on the term “zero waste,” a new lifestyle trend that advocates for living without consuming any single-use plastics or trash at all.

I first learned about the idea over ten years ago when Colin Beavan, a New Yorker, attempted to live the most sustainably a human possibly can. With his blog “No Impact Man,” Beavon lived a carbon-free lifestyle for a year, forgoing electricity, gas-powered transportation and packaged food to see if it were possible to live without any environmental impact. Beavon’s project stuck with me, though I never went through with it myself, and years later, I was reminded of it again as the zero waste movement began cropping up on the internet with more and more fervor.

Like Beavon’s “No Impact Man” project, zero wasters attempt to do what, to many, seems unachievable: they live without producing any trash. Rather than take a 13 gallon trash bag out to the curb every week (as I do), zero wasters collect their trash in a small mason jar, filling it up over the year, if that. Subscribing to a zero waste lifestyle intrigued me from the beginning. The purity, sanctimony, perfection of it all drew me in, especially since I try to live an environmentally responsible life and often, overwhelmingly fail.

After reading through zero waste blogs incessantly, I began taking on some easy zero waste swaps myself: cotton cloths instead of paper towels, reusable bags at the grocery instead of plastic ones, bulk tea instead of the packaged variety. I kept telling myself that I’d go full zero waste for a month but then each week crept in, never the right time for the experiment.

Initially I thought that I would start on a Sunday at my neighborhood’s farmers market but I often woke up hungover and in need of a Gatorade, or I had brunch plans with a friend on the one day the market was open and couldn’t make it to buy local fruits, veggies and cheese unpackaged before it closed. Reality set in that going zero waste was really hard, and so I kept putting it off.

The most daunting aspect of zero waste for me was figuring out what to do about groceries. In order to avoid anything wrapped in plastic, zero waste calls for buying unpackaged fruits and vegetables, and then grains, pasta, legumes and snacks from bulk bins (using your own reusable bag for filling of course). This means making all of your food from scratch, which, for a mediocre cook like myself, sounds almost impossible.

While there’s a rhythm one develops when they do more of their own cooking, it’s hard for me to fathom how I can make three meals a day from unpackaged ingredients while also working, maintaining friendships, seeing family, exercising, going on a weekend trip, taking up a hobby or dealing with an illness. I know it can be done. The internet assures me it can be done. But while I subscribe to the tenets and the idea of zero waste, I just can’t see how one makes food without plastic wrap working its way in.

Take for example, a veggie burger and chips for dinner. The zero waste way of making a veggie burger and chips means setting aside a few hours one night to make the burgers from beans, onions, peppers, spices and an egg, and then frying one’s own potato chips. Perhaps this is doable but then what happens when I want to add ketchup and mustard? Do I grab my mustard seeds and start grinding? Also, do I have to start the whole process the day before, soaking my own beans and cooking them on the stove in order to avoid an aluminum can? Would every meal be a two day affair?

This is not impossible. Many people around the world make their meals from scratch but they are usually a) women in rural areas with no other choice or b) full time homemakers with someone else’s salary supporting them. As writer Taffy Broddeser-Akner’s mother says to her in a Bon Appetit essay, “You can either cook or work.” I work, which means I buy my grapefruit juice and almond milk in plastic and cardboard containers thank you very much.

In a way though, I am spoiled, as we all are. So much of what we buy comes in some form of packaging, and the zero waste movement is undeniably a response to this modern fact of life. I don’t go a day without consuming something (if I include the most vital act of feeding myself) and what comes along with consumption is its nasty byproduct: single use packaging. So the question is: how then do I stay sane and live my life, avoiding a pesky product I see everywhere I look?

Most zero wasters would say that the end goal of zero waste is not necessarily to arrive at a place where you produce no trash but rather, to rethink habits and reduce where you can. As Celia Ristow of the blog Litterless says, “Zero waste means progress, not perfection.” That is a sentiment I can get behind. I can rethink what I buy. I can forgo plastic in some areas. And yet, the world doesn’t really know what to do with the moderate so there tends to be a novelty in the end goal of zero.

This is bad for me, considering that I have the opposite of an addictive personality. I’m much too indifferent to go to extremes, too curious to not want to try everything. And so, while I have taken on some easy zero waste swaps, I mostly scroll through zero waste feeds on Instagram and wonder how anyone gets to that end goal. Do they have hobbies? Do they ever crave a frozen pizza? In my more cynical moments, I find myself rolling my eyes, believing it a scam (no secondhand garment has ever fit me that good, I think, staring at the young woman in her “thrift store” jeans). But of course, I am not actually opposed to the trend, just wish that social media acknowledged its difficulties within the context of real life.

Part of my objection to zero waste is laziness, sure, but also part of it is gendered. The work of making one’s life zero waste means more time spent in the kitchen, doing women’s work and part of me fears that while women slave away to curb our reliance on plastic and put as little dent in our landfill as possible, men won’t offer to help us in this fight. In addition, there’s the possibility that while women stay at home in the kitchen, men will spend their time working, rising to positions of power, perhaps making decisions of graver environmental consequence.

Of zero waste bloggers, the majority are young millennial women or stay at home mothers, a trend which makes me uneasy. I went to a zero waste meet up once and walked in to find a table full of women. A table that soon began lamenting over how to get their boyfriends or husbands on board with these new, more tedious habits. Most women are still fighting for society to see household chores as a task of both male and female head of households, and so what will happen when we add to this task list?

And what’s more, there may be deep-rooted patriarchal notions at work behind the female buy-in of this trend. Underneath it all, I wonder if there is an uneasiness in women to take up space (either in a room or via trash in a landfill) or a tendency to sacrifice so others don’t have to. I wonder if women feel they have more power in their homes than their workplace or senator’s office. Of course, perhaps it is none of these things. Perhaps it’s just an effect of its styling; marketed toward women, it leaves men hesitant to pick it up.

Regardless, I do feel there would be some resentment if I spent my nights prepping to make zero waste lunches and dinners and condiments and cleaning products while my boyfriend buys his Chipotle and goes off to rock climb every other day, as he does. While I’m busy being zero waste, will he be busy training? What then if I want to climb alongside him too?



The nuances of modern day feminism can be confusing, and ultimately a woman’s choice of how she wants to work toward change is her own. Colin Beavon, aka “No Impact Man,” ran into similar issues that many homemakers face in his “No Impact Man” documentary, saying to his wife at one point, “You only eat local food but who provides it, who cooks it, who gets up in the morning and makes you breakfast every day, does your lunch, does your dinner then generally washes the dishes when it’s all done?” Ultimately both his concerns and his wife’s as a working mother are valid. It brings up the most important theme that zero waste brings to bear, one I think that confounds us all: what are we willing to do, what are we willing to sacrifice so that we can preserve our planet?

The work of change is hard, as zero waste reminds us. Working toward social good involves difficult things like running for office, organizing over the long term, putting our kids in public schools, adopting or fostering, using our time to help a friend or a family member or stranger overcome addiction, depression, what have you. And when it comes to the environment, I think if we’re honest with ourselves, it involves similar sacrifice. It means reducing our trash, living in smaller spaces, taking public transportation, living closer to the things we need, consuming less, flying less, eating less meat.

That being said, I am far from perfect. I fly 3–4 times a year, a number I morally can’t feel right about even if I buy carbon offsets at the end of the year. And jealousy pervades me often. Daily I see clothes I would like to have; I see friends and strangers traveling places I would like to go; I think about living someplace with a yard. Still, I know that I could be doing more. I can’t help but think of my Grandpa, who grew up during the depression and still wears slippers from thirty years ago, the hole in the big toe patched up and worn away a thousand times over. Living in a world where temperatures rise and natural disasters intensify, I question what I really ask of myself (honestly, not much).

It is perhaps one of the most unpopular of opinions, that change will come with a cost to ourselves but it is one I wish we would all start to embrace. As of right now, I am not zero waste but I am making zero waste changes, trying to lessen my environmental impact. I’ve begun to feel the pang of sacrifice — either through the time that I spend preparing my own food or the money I donate or the bus trip I take instead of getting into my car — as a token, an acknowledgement that I’m doing the hard work. And when it hurts, I reach out to others doing the same to find some joy in it all.

Of course, change won’t come from just changing my own habits, as many critics of zero waste will say (an argument that honestly, I find quite banal). If I wait for everyone to become magically selfless and anti-consumerist, the results will be disastrous, but I do think there is hope that when a select group starts adopting new habits, pressure will accumulate for larger, systematic changes. Perhaps one day, plastic will be cast aside and a new, compostable version will come to fruition. Perhaps, a carbon tax will finally take effect. Until then, all I have is the power to reduce my consumption and maximize my political power.

Still, I wrestle with the hypotheticals often; my critiques of and compassion for zero waste. There are certain scenarios I wonder about, like whether it would be better to stay at home and prepare a zero waste, local, vegetarian dinner or just grab whatever I can (in whatever packaging it comes in) because I have to run to my senator’s office after work and protest whatever needs protesting. In this case, the latter may be a worthy exception.

In the end, with gender and privilege and ability wrapped up in all of this, the practicality and effectiveness of a zero waste lifestyle can be difficult to decipher but I think working toward a sustainable future will always be a hard battle, full of a thousand nuances. It’s confusing — but I suppose working toward any worthwhile goal always will be.